They debarked down a wooden ramp into the warm sea as it ebbed from a wide yellow shore blanketed in expelled seaweed. Driftwood trunks emerged from the sand like the ribs of ancient leviathans whitened and cured by salt and sun. Amid them amassed orcs of all kinds and ages and tribes. Some sat on their knees with their faces pressed against the sand. Some carried others past the dark line left by the surf and laid them side by side with their feet toward the sea and their toes falling outward and they placed colorful stones over their closed eyes. Some walked inland to the foot of a red sandstone cliff where hoodoos towered and hulked like trolls standing sentinel. From horizon to horizon the cliff stretched with only a single break at a dark and jagged crack taller than the ships' masts yet no wider, vaguely known to Orc as the maw of the mad.

He stopped at the bottom of the ramp with Ogaz beside him. A wave swept up the sand and sank into it. White foam swirled around their ankles and sizzled under their toes.

"Can Orc see Glad Nizam?" said Ogaz.

"He’s seeing something."

He watched orcs kiss the ground and rise with tears in their eyes for which he felt no affinity. He studied the dearth of the place. An absolute lack for which he would not weep. He watched those same orcs reaching out to one another holding arm in arm and forehead to forehead in damp embraces as if reunited after lifetimes apart. He would not weep for them either. He wasn’t sure there was anybody alive he could weep for, and when Ogaz caught him watching he said as much.

"Not even Orc's military lady?" said Ogaz.

He shook his head. "She’s who taught me not to drag around my baggage."

Ogaz watched his face. "Very sad. Orc knowing she loves him yes? Is why she did what she did."

Orc remembered the day she had abandoned him: the olives high on the branches, the dusty training circle, the blood on the sand. He sniffed. The glare on the sand made it difficult to see. Perhaps he could weep after all. "Sure,” he said. “She loved me so much she left me to the damned pit."

"Better there than camps."

He squinted at the strand and the hoodoos and the narrow slot, known to him from the myths she had told in the greatroom on long winter nights, their shadows backcast on the floor and on the far wall dancing opposite the firelight. She who recounted stories invented by a folk who'd long forgotten them. She who safeguarded them as a penance for her unspeakable shames, this old woman who loved an orc. Folly.

Orc nodded at the slot. "There's your home."

He saw Ogaz smile so wide his cheeks unfolded from his tusks. "Home."

Orc didn't smile. This place was as lean and desolate and alien as his folk. He felt no connection to it. He had hoped to feel something. But there was nothing. Whose fault was that?

A pretty sow standing in the surf called to him. "Those arms, scaler?"

He held [Booky's blade] and the black bladed [alpenstock] for her to see.

She put her chin toward the slot in the wall. "Get up to Glad Nizam. She wants em all accounted."

Ogaz slapped his back. "Glad Nizam wanting Orc. And Orc worrying he doesn't belong. How now?"

"She just wants the weapons."

"We will see, we will see."

As they started up the sow said, "Not you, tusker. Unless you won arms you'll need to wait til work's found for you. No work, no food. Understand? No working, no eating." She turned back to her watch.

The corners of Ogaz's mouth were white from dried spit and salt water. "Sow talks like Ogaz still in camps, talks like Glad Nizam telling what's doing. But Glad Nizam says all are brothers at home, and Orc says here is home, yes?"

"Yes."

"Then why is sow talking like Ogaz still in camps?"

"Can't say."

Ogaz crouched on the sand and shaded his eyes and regarded the cliff and the slot shot through it. "Ogaz waits here. Hurry Orc. Remember everything Glad Nizam says. Maybe remembering Ogaz back on beach. Hungry and thirsty Ogaz."

Orc turned toward the slot and again saw the weeping orcs. None of them had ever before seen their home, yet there they were falling over it. And over each other. He looked at Ogaz and then at the orcs, as if he was looking for something he had once possessed and later lost. He pushed the [alpenstock] into Ogaz's hands and said, "Follow me."

Ogaz held it away from his body as if it was a rotten fish. "Beardling ax isn't Ogaz's."

"They don't know that."

"Ogaz not lying to Glad Nizam."

"Shut up and come on."

They climbed the shore. In the shade of the sandstone cliff an orc [captain] waved them over. He wore a dwarven helm pushed back from his face and his skin was as red and as rough as the sandstone. He squatted between two empty crates with human letters branded to their sides. Across their tops laid a plank bearing a cut up boar's carcass. Tusks and dark organs and masticated bones swimming in a great pool of blood. Swollen black flies buzzed maddened spirals and landed to gorge themselves on the mess and buzzed again to bounce off Orc and meander away.

A [boarding pike] and a [carpenter's mallet] and several [harpoon] barbs and plundered dwarven longarms were stacked against a red flake that had detached from the wall. Nearby the slot in the cliff spat hot air like an open stove and Glad Nizam sat between a huge shorthorn whose [spear] came to her shoulder and a little greenskin clutching a [longarm] twice his height. Glad Nizam leaned away in her chair with one arm draped over its back holding a boar's thigh picked clean and she tapped a man's riding crop against her bare brown knee. A lion's head emblemed on its lash. She spoke quietly with a tusker [weird] who knelt beside her in the shadow. The [weird]'s arms and chest were bare but for the sundried blood of men smeared in the forbidden pattern.

The [captain] said, "Two more's come."

Glad Nizam's head turned. Her face was latticed by scars. One black eye burned the whole world in its globe and the other was white and sightless. Her silvering hair pulled tightly back from her brow and tied in a knot behind her head with a leather thong. She tossed the thigh bone into the orange dust and sat back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. Her crop's lash kissed a scar on her cheek.

"Who you be, eh?" she said.

"Orc."

"Yeah? Me too."

"Maybe, but I'm Orc."

"As you say, noname. Orc of?"

He almost said the [brigadier]'s name. "Nobody."

Ogaz touched his arm. "Much honor if Orc's mother dies fighting. Some if father dies fighting. Fighting humans, fighting dwarves. Tell now who and how."

He looked from Ogaz to Glad Nizam. "Nobody," he said again.

"Noname of nobody. And you?"

The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"Ogaz."

"Of?"

"Nobody," but he looked at the ground when he said it.

Glad Nizam said, "Plenty of nobodies here. Plenty of orcs, too," and she laughed sharply like the gulls roosting out on the ships' yards and she took little breaths between each as if her lungs were scarred like her face.

"You're called Glad Nizam," he said. "Ogaz tells me you lead orcs, yet you sit in a chair like an old woman."

"When Orc is always walking ahead and leading thousands and bearing their burdens on back like Glad Nizam will his feet tire too," said Ogaz.

"Well said, Ogaz," said Glad Nizam.

Orc frowned. "Your sow down on the beach says you have food," said Orc.

"Here." Glad Nizam pointed her crop at the boar's offal. "But it be only for scouts and hunters til more's brought in. Guessing your nobody didn't learn you to fish, scaler?" Her good eye flicked to the sea.

"No."

"Another thing men took from us. Reckon lotta fish to be had out there."

"Me and Ogaz don't need hunters' meat. We'll take mush."

"Mush?" said the [captain]. He laughed and the greenskin and the shorthorn laughed with him. "They fed you mush to keep you weak. Time to be strong," and he flexed at Orc and his dwarven helmet slid down his forehead.

"You want shit the ships be full of it,” said Glad Nizam, “but there be no more mush."

Orc looked at the ships and the gulls in their tops and the bodies being carried from their holds and the martial figures of women carved into their bows. He saw one bore the [brigadier]'s likeness.

"You should burn them," he said.

"We'll need them," said Glad Nizam.

"Men will come for them."

"Maybe they'll bring you some mush."

A wiry brown sow with orange dust up her calves edged around Orc to stand by the crates. She had a soldier's [knife] in her hand and a cub on her hip. She looked hard at the [alpenstock] Ogaz held. The cub looked wide eyed at the boar's bones and blood and put his hand on his little swollen belly and swung his feet in the air and said, "Mama, mama," and pointed.

Glad Nizam stood up from her chair. She was tall. Magnificent in her own fashion. "Come now, noname and Ogaz. Folks be waiting on you. Show me what you brought and we'll get you working."

Orc lifted [Booky's blade] so Glad Nizam could see.

Glad Nizam scraped a finger across its point. "Thin for a slicer. Might work for sticking boars."

"Does boars fine."

"You hunt?"

"No."

Glad Nizam shook her head slightly. "Looks human made."

"It is."

"You kill one for it?"

"Didn't kill no one for it. It was given to me."

"By who?"

"A woman."

"And the beardling ax?"

Ogaz said, "Is Orc's."

Glad Nizam reached for the [alpenstock]'s shaft. "I'll take it and that pigsticker too. We be needing sound and sharp arms to feed this lot."

Orc grabbed the [alpenstock] by its black head. "They're mine."

"Not no more. You don't fish. You don't hunt. You be coming up with arms you ain't won. You be big for a mush eating scaler. Been taking extra shares from the larder. Stealing food outta your brothers' mouths. Not no more. Let go noname."

"No."

"Don't make me take em off you, cause I will."

"No you won't."

The sow's cub said, "Mama," and tugged on her hair. Her head twitched a little with each tug. Her eyes stayed on Glad Nizam. Orc saw her start to raise her [knife].

Glad Nizam squinted her good eye and pulled on the [alpenstock] and dragged Orc forward. She leaned into him with her bad eye and she tapped a finger against her blindside temple. "Now I see who you be."

She released the [alpenstock] and turned to the sow. "Your boy want a bite of kidney he can have a bite, but only one," she said. She came around the crates and when the [captain] and greenskin and shorthorn started to follow she half turned and said, "You stay and make sure our feast don't go nowhere."

She wrapped a hand around Orc's arm and gestured toward the slot's narrow aperture. "Walk with me, orc called Orc."

They entered the slot with him leading her like some picturebook gentleman with his grandmother on his arm. Hot wind blowing out of the slot drove sand into his eyes and dried his sweat and rattled a waxy sage growing at the place where the stone wall met the sandy ground.

"Feel your mother's breath?" she said.

"Is maw of Mad?" said Ogaz.

She nodded. "We be home, tusker Ogaz."

"But where is Mad?" said Ogaz. "And his trees and fishes and snakes? His wild fruits for eating and lions for hunting? His sisters and brothers left behind? Where are they?"

"We be unsure," said Glad Nizam. She turned to Orc. "Where be your ogre?"

"Only ogre I knew weren't mine. They went their own way when your lot showed up."

"But you be the red blooded orc who fought for that pitmistress."

"My blood's as black as yours."

"We'll be seeing. Orcs here would open their veins before turning a blade where some human bid. They'd kill you if they knew who you be and what you did."

"Orc's not like you hear," said Ogaz. "Many kindnesses he shows Ogaz asea. He is good orc, following Glad Nizam like Ogaz."

She looked at Ogaz. "No tusker. Not like you. This one danced while we broke teeth on the armiger's rocks. He ate good meat while we starved. Now he prefers mush. Why do you back him, Ogaz of nobody?"

Ogaz hooked a thumb into his waistband at the small of his back and looked at the ground.

"Thought so," said Glad Nizam. "You dishonor your nobody's memory. I know who you be also. Do not hitch your salvation to his. Better to find your own way than follow this orc killing armiger's plaything."

Orc said, "I never killed any orc nor met any armiger."

"Don't lie to me musheater." Glad Nizam stepped close enough to whisper. "I smell the deaths on your heart. Why you be here? Come to kill more of your folk?"

"No."

"Come to spy for your pitmistress?"

"I'm just trying to find my way home same as you."

"And you think it be with us." Glad Nizam stood back and looked him up and down. "You be lucky I have need for fighters. Do as I say and we'll be seeing if you be worth keeping."

"I'm done doing what others tell."

"Then go back to your humans. Plenty down the coast in their huts and keeps. Plenty of mush there for you. Go now and see how they welcome you."

He looked down the strand. Then he looked down at [Booky's blade].

"You be thinking violence now?"

He pulled his eyes from the [blade].

"You be orc enough to try?"

He saw a dozen ways to kill the scarred old sow. All of them meant giving up everything he wanted. Perhaps this was how the [brigadier] had felt.

"Red blooded." She spat at his feet then turned to Ogaz. "You sticking with him Ogaz of nobody?"

Ogaz nodded.

"Fine. He be your responsibility. Look here. See that sage? All them dead trees rolled up on the beach? the Mad should be pissing into the sea. You be going to find out why it ain't. We sent two up already. One came back jabbering bout men, but there ain't no men here."

"There are men everywhere," said Orc.

"You'd know. Will that beardling ax'll sever a man's spine? Give me it."

Ogaz handed her the [alpenstock]. Glad Nizam drew a lump of flesh wrapped in spotted and seeping sailcloth and held it in her open palm. With the [alpenstock]'s black adze she split the lump in two. "This'll get you where you need to go. Find the other scout, or the Mad, or men's heads. Come back with one or two or all, or don't come back."

"I don't know nothing about scouting," said Orc.

Glad Nizam nodded at Ogaz. "He does. Water be rated higher than our lost scouts or starting another war. You find it you come straight back and we'll worry about the other things once some of your brothers be fit to walk. You find any food you bring that too. We be stuck foraging til the whaler shows with its fat filled hold. Stop standing around." She gave back the [alpenstock] and she slapped her crop once against [Booky's blade] to make it sing then she strode out of the slot and back to the crates and the sow who stood in the shade holding her cub.

Orc heard her say, "Give me your eye, sow. Don't look at him. He is nothing." He watched her put her thumb and finger under the cub's chin and he saw her wink her bad eye at the cub with a sneer that must've been a smile.

Orc looked down and unwrapped his lump of flesh and saw it was the boar's halved heart. Sand borne by the wind stuck to its facets. He turned back to the mass of orcs, long lost now found. At those already lain in a row on the beach, unsweating and unhungering and yellowing like the sand with stones for eyes. At the cubs crouching beside them, as still as the corpses, their tiny hands grasping sharp fragments of bone and lengths of calcified driftwood as if to measure their hunger against that of the laughing gulls.

----------------------------------------

> +1 [Rage] ...from the very beginning apologists claimed the camps were a necessary evil after what happened to their homeland. Yet from the same mouths come the words: evil begets evil... (5/10)

> +1 [Renown] ...even old white eye knew him for who he was and she ain't had no use for no nobodies… (6/10)