The first thing General Venka had done when Ensharia was finally taken from her makeshift cell and marched alongside his men, was to shackle her. He’d used big, thick bands of iron to do it. Things large enough that a normal woman wouldn’t have been able to raise her arms against their weight, strong enough that she might have struggled to break them were she unbound and armed with an axe.
He needn’t have bothered. The day before, and the night after it, she’d spent virtually all of her time healing the pirate. Ensharia was not a true healer, not even a true Cleric of her order whose power was focused exclusively in such things rather than equipping its wielder with physicality and potency. Her ability to restore a man’s life and strength was stretched almost to its limits in treating Swick the Swift. Almost.
Now, the pirate shuffled along just ahead of her. His feet were bound in shackles of leather fixed to thick rope, like Ensharia behind him, and like the man behind her. Slaves. Captured and sealed, dragged along in the wake of General Venka and his grey-skinned engine of war. Ensharia felt rather sick at the very thought.
Orcs were among the slaves. That fact had surprised her, when she’d first learned of it the day before. It seemed absurd. Orcs were the soldiers, they were Venka’s warriors, and yet the more she considered it the more sense it made. Humans were her warriors, too. And they were the Dark Lord’s. There was no reason a species could not be cast into two roles at once.
Soon enough they stopped, and their work began. While some slaves set up tents for the officers and pickets for defence, others, like Ensharia, were put to work in more manual roles. It was their job to provide the campfires.
Apparently the black dirt of the Dark Lord’s lands could be burned, it simply required the right treatments first. One of the major steps was compressing it. Such knowledge was known well in advance of Venka’s expedition, had been for years, and so the forces had hauled several purpose-made wooden moulds to do so. She’d been confused, at first, by the metal bands around the sides of the moulds. Then the work had begun.
In making the black dirt useful as fuel, one had to squeeze it to an absurd degree. Ensharia was taught to fill the containers up roughly three quarters, leaving the dirt piled up to a line drawn just a hand or two from the top, then press down an iron top, drive a lever through a side slot and start drawing it back to crush the stuff.
Easy work, at first. Then harder. Ensharia eyed the lid of the thing, knowing that she was permitted to call each batch finished only once it had reached the median point of the container. Every inch closer it came, the effort required for the next shift grew ever more. She started looking at the other workers for some example of how she might improve around the sixty percent mark.
Most others, she realised, were working in teams. Five, even six orcs at each lever, all gripping and grunting, sweat building against their skin in great globules. Ensharia’s body was still sore, throbbing, and at any other time it might have been heartening to see so many great brutes needed to match her own work.
Now, she just found herself dwelling on how similar their roles had become. She was an orc in function, and lesser even than most of the orcs present.
Certainly, less than the humans were.
Ensharia’s work was finished soon, despite her injuries. That much she could thank Silenos for. The Saviour’s Fleshcrafting was growing on her by the day, proving itself well worth the moral compromise each and every time she put it to work, and the free rest she gained from using it so was valuable. It meant more time to spend resting, and more strength to use once she’d finished her recovery. All that was left was finding the best way to use it.
Her much needed observations were not given much time to be completed, however. A voice soon rang out in her ear, interrupting whatever surveillance she might have managed and almost making Ensharia jump.
“I was half drunk when I got Shaiagrazni’s message.”
She turned, half expecting some orc or even Venka, realising what the words meant- how many possibilities they eliminated- only as she finished turning. Swick the Swift was seated a foot or two beside her, still chained just as tightly, still bound to the orcs working away not three yards ahead. His face was almost unrecognisable. The man’s broad grin was gone, his unbroken cockiness shattered. The sockets of his eyes seemed deeper than before, the eyes themselves bloodshot, and by the texture of his skin and hair he seemed to have aged halfway into a corpse.
Ensharia took the sights in while digesting his words, taking her time before replying to them.
“I thought you were always half drunk.” She noted, testily. He didn’t react to her response at all, simply moved past it as if he’d not even noticed.
“Half drunk, fully stupid.” Swick murmured. “They were my men, my crew, and we’d sailed for years. A decade, some of them. Seizing entire galleons, snatching home tons of gold. Literally tons! Another few years and we’d have been rich, all of us. I’d have watched some of them retire with wealth to make most nobles jealous, and made some of the others my captains. Always wanted my own fleet of ships. Admiral Swick the Swift, King of the sky pirates, dominator of the winds…Aye, that always seemed good for me.”
She didn’t say anything this time, only watched him speak. Listening with a sickening satisfaction. Ensharia wouldn’t have expected the display she saw now, not from a man half as proud as the captain had been. She wondered what the cause was for all of a second before it became apparent.
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“Ah!” Swick winced, clutching his head. “Shit, the headache.”
Ensharia had treated her fair share of drunks, and knew the sight of withdrawal all too well. It could get nasty in most men, as bodily functions either shut down or went haywire, mind sending its vessel into spasmodic frenzy as if to compensate for all the hours spent blunted and dull. That didn’t happen to Swick the Swift, such things were difficult to inflict on a man of his native physical prowess, but it almost felt like he’d have been struck by a mercy if it had.
“You took a risk.” She said, hesitantly. “They all knew what they were in for, you told me that yourself.”
She had been ready for more drunken self-loathing or hatred. The fire he directed at her as she said that left her taken aback completely.
“Don’t speak on things you don’t understand.” The pirate snapped. “They didn’t sign up to be thrown into suicide by some drunkard.”
Tears were threatening to form upon the man’s features, and Ensharia felt whatever animosity or disgust she’d been overcome with earlier bleed back into simple pity. Perhaps it was weak of her.
It certainly wasn’t kind, because Swick the Swift didn’t so much as glance back at Ensharia after that. Just remained locked in his own agony. She found herself reassessing the man, watching him blubber and weep.
Ensharia decided he really did need a drink, after all.
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A day passed, and Ensharia used it well in learning even more about the circumstances around her. Some of it was rather promising and good, other things, most things, were terrible. It was, she supposed, the sort of ratio one might expect from information gained while held chained and imprisoned amidst a horde of orcs.
The orcs were what soaked up most of her studies, and for good reason. It was taught among Paladins that they were simple creatures. Clever enough for tool usage and primitive ambushes, but never any form of complex society. When more than a few hundred joined together they would invariably collapse and schism through in-fighting. What Ensharia was seeing around her now, though, defied it all.
Venka had managed to forge a military glue capable of binding even the most savage species of all into one block, and the more she observed, the more she understood how it worked.
Each orc was motivated not by loyalty, or a yearning for status, but by fear of becoming like the ones beneath them. The basest soldiers acted to keep from being made slaves, the officers acted out of desperation to keep themselves removed from the common ranks, and Venka’s most trusted orcs each worked tirelessly to retain his favour. It was a brutal system, leaving countrymen pitted against one another, and yet it held the orcs chained into their stations remarkably well.
Ensharia’s appreciation for it only grew, the more she saw of their casual savagery.
Brawls were common, and terrifying. The strength an orc could unleash in battle was sufficient to send another of their kind flying and rolling as if they weighed no more than children. Ground was churned up and dirt cast in all directions whenever two of them fought, and on the occasions where they snagged the slave’s binding rope, it would drag several to the floor. Each time Ensharia was pulled from whatever thoughts occupied her and reminded of the monstrous company she was trapped among.
Her one reprieve came briefly, as she passed a flower. It wasn’t anything big. A small, fragile strip of crimson petals mounted on a withered stem, hunched and desiccated amid the ocean of black dirt around it. She couldn’t have explained why, if pressed, but the sight of it still left a tear welling in the ducts of her eyes even still. It was hope in a land of ruin.
Ensharia made herself look away from the flower, and focus back upon their march.
Her body still ached, despite the time spent recovering and healing, and it would continue to ache no matter how long she was given for it to mend. That was Venka’s doing. The General had not been satisfied with what Ensharia had told him, which was almost fair enough, given that she had lied and feigned ignorance without exception. He had called for her torture, one day and then the next. Ensharia had felt her skin peeled back from muscle, flesh burned and tortured by hot iron, had a molar torn from her mouth and a steel-tipped whip strike at her back and buttocks with such force that it would have flayed a tree of its bark.
Through it all, she’d surrendered nothing.
Venka had surely not expected her to, because he didn’t seem the least bit surprised. Ensharia might have hoped he would grow tired of the torment, that she might be spared further agony the next night, but somehow she doubted it. General Venka did not strike her as the sort of man to stop doing a thing just because he grew weary of it.
Something moved in Ensharia’s vision, drawing her eyes back across to the site of the flower. She felt a stab of urgency take her at the sight of an orc kneeling down beside it, reaching to the dirt and plucking the plant free.
Her fury was instantaneous and instinctive, sending her surging on for the savage with such force that she toppled several of the beasts still tethered to her in doing so.
It looked up just as Ensharia came over to shove it, sending the orc flat against the floor, eyes wide and face tight with sudden fear as she stared down at it.
“Why did you do that?” She snarled, temper almost blinding her. “That was the only living thing anywhere in this awful place, what made you so incapable of resisting its destruction? Do you just hate life?”
The orc stared up at her, and to Ensharia’s surprise its face was twisted more by confusion than hate or fear. Carefully, slowly, it took an arm out from under itself and raised it out to her. The fist was curled, and she took a half-step back from it, fearing an attack. When it unfurled, however, Ensharia found nothing within. Save a crimson flower, resting along the palm.
It had been spared any damage at all, despite the orc’s heavy fall. Preserved delicately and perfectly amid the grey flesh.
“Sorry.” The orc mumbled, not meeting her eye. “Flower prit tee. Human like flower. I…Wanted make hap pea.”
Something twisted in Ensharia’s breast, and she reevaluated the information. The orc hadn’t been destroying the flower, Ensharia realised. He’d been picking it. Picking it for her.
Forcing herself calm, swallowing the blend of guilt and regret, Ensharia slowly reached out to take the delicate plant. Eyes wide, heart breaking as the orc flinched again. He hadn’t meant any harm at all.
“I’m sorry.” She breathed, speaking slowly and clearly for the sake of understanding. “I…Didn’t realise what you were doing, I…This is a lovely flower, thank you.” She took the thing, raising it up to her head and gently pushing its step into her hair. It was all tangled, knotted and greasy from unwashed travels, but that only made the flower hold its place easier.
The orc’s eyes brightened a shade as Ensharia helped him up.