“I will let go of your mouth now,” she said, scanning what lay ahead of her, to the left and to the right. She did not let go of Franziskus’ mouth. She had carefully surveyed the scene before approaching, but now it had all gone out of her head. “I will let go of your mouth now, but if you so much as cough…”
It was all flat ground, with hills rising up on both sides, up towards the mountains. It was scattered bodies all around, and mud, and—there. A good hundred feet away, an upturned cart, its wheels lopped off its axle, scorch marks up and down its unfinished wood.
She slowly removed her hand from Franziskus’ face, ready to clamp it back again if he made a peep. “They’re coming back. Your best hope lies in silence. Be a corpse, Franziskus, or they’ll make you one.”
Then she sprinted towards the cart. During the length of her run, she heard nothing but blood rushing in her ears. Saw the battlefield and the strewn corpses floating past her, slowly, as in one of those dreams where you need to run from something, but your legs can scarcely move. Finally she hit the ground beside the cart, rolling in, skidding through mud, slamming into its singed wooden side. As soon as she stopped she could hear other things again. She heard the crows overhead, then another orcish sound, possibly laughing, though Angelika did not know for sure if orcs were capable of laughter. It was not a cheerful or encouraging sound. She wedged both hands in the tiny space between the top of the cart and the muddy ground. It hurt; the cart was heavy and her angle was all wrong. She heard snorting and throaty barking. She girded herself, got the cart up a few inches and then, on her belly, wriggled under the space she’d made. The cart fell back down onto her neck and shoulders, but she scraped along anyhow and worked herself all the way inside. She turned and there was the dead face of a soldier, burned to the quick and grinning yellow teeth at her.
She winced and wriggled away, up towards the front of the cart. A little diffuse red light was working its way under the cart, which meant that maybe there was a space to peep through. Angelika crawled until her eyes and nose sat right in front of this small space between cart and ground. She saw big boots made from scraps of fur and cloth and leather. She saw legs: some naked, green, and muscled; others greaved in mismatched bits of battered metal armour. Counting them, she decided that there were either five or six orcs. Judging their size from the legs, there wasn’t a single one of them she’d ever want to fight against.
The legs were stepping their way through bodies on the scattered plain. They hadn’t yet reached the big ridge of corpses but they seemed to be poking their way in that direction. Most of the orcish talk seemed to come from one big specimen, possibly the one with the most valuable armour. Angelika wished she could understand them but the orc tongue wasn’t just something you could pick up by sitting about in taverns or going to study at a monastery. It was a good enough guess, though, that the well-armoured one’s grunts and hisses were orders. He stood there barking, and the others, in response, picked their way through the bodies.
One bent down low enough that its head suddenly entered her field of vision. It was big, shaped like a malformed melon, with a face that was mostly jaw, from which well-chipped ochre tusks, each about the size of Angelika’s dagger, jutted unevenly up and down. The orc grabbed at a corpse’s wrist with its massive green hand, and stared at it long enough for a white globule of snot to gather in one of its tiny, triangular nostrils, then slide down to its lip, finally disappearing into its mouth. Then the orc, blinking its red-rimmed eyes in frustration or annoyance, let the body’s wrist flop listlessly back into the mud.
Angelika could not think what it was they were looking for. Not valuables, certainly. Nor weapons—there were a few pieces lying only partially buried in the mud, and these the orcs ignored.
She turned her head slightly to see what was happening to the side, closer to the body pile. She saw another orc, this one with pus-filled buboes, each the size of a copper coin, all over the skin of its squashed and narrow head. It ducked down over the body of the old bearded soldier, the one she’d helped die. The orc sniffed the dead man like a dog would, then rubbed its purulent face over the torso. Then it shook its head and vengefully spat a wad of phlegm into the corpse’s dead eye.
Angelika understood: they were looking for someone who was still alive. This one could tell somehow that the old veteran was still warm. But not warm enough, which is why he was angry. They’d keep going, she realized, until they found Franziskus. And then the boy would take his revenge on her, pointing out the cart. Angelika told herself that she should have slit his throat when she had the opportunity. But the trouble is, you almost never know whose throat you should cut until afterwards.
A round of low shrieks and gravelly gabbling rose up to the left. Angelika could no longer see any orcs and scrambled to adjust her position, to change her field of view. She hit her knee on a rock and nearly cried out. She pushed her body up flush with the front of the cart, and through the crack could now again see orc feet. Some were dancing up and down. Others were firmly planted. They were in front of the corpse pile. Angelika could not really see what was going on, but from the positions of the legs could guess: they’d found Franziskus and were hauling him out.
She turned again, in the confined space under the cart, looking for a better weapon than her dagger. She imagined them suddenly pulling the cart away and tried to think of the best defence. Probably it would be to leap towards them as soon as the cart moved, to scrabble her skinny, mud-slicked body between orcish legs, and keep on going past them. She would run to the right, past the corpse ridge, then up into the hills. Angelika was fast but had never tried to outrun orcs.
Her spindly legs might not be a match for the big pillars of muscle underneath those brutes, but that would not stop her from trying. From the sidelines, she’d watched several battles, and knew that often soldiers died because they gave up too soon. Angelika would not die from giving up.
It bothered her that she would not be given the chance to avenge herself against the boy for squealing. Still, he would meet a gruesome end, though at hands other than her own.
She saw Franziskus dangling upside down, then being dropped headfirst into the muck and blood. He rolled over onto his back and reached to his belt for a weapon, but a vast orc boot came crunching down on his wrist. Franziskus bucked and cursed. His face turned red with the effort, but they had him good. His off-hand was still free and Angelika readied herself for what would happen next. The boy would not speak orcish but he could still tell them what they needed to know.
Then the pustule-ridden orc bent down over Franziskus’ legs with an oversized cabbage sack. For some reason, its burlap had been dyed a splotchy purple. It had a big drawstring on it, of muck-stained cord. The buboed orc rolled the bag up over the boy’s feet and shins while two others held his legs. The bag went up over Franziskus’ waist. Then to his chest. The orcs roughly jammed his seized arms down over his torso. Then the bag went up past his shoulders.
Franziskus turned his head towards her. He surely couldn’t tell, Angelika knew, that he was meeting her eyes. He directed an imploring expression at her nonetheless. Moving his lips in slow exaggeration, he mouthed the words: Please. Help. Me.
Then the bag went up over his head and the drawstring pulled shut and one of the biggest orcs seized it by the top and hefted it over his back, so that all but the cord, dragging in the muck behind him as he walked, disappeared from Angelika’s view. The other orc legs and orc boots followed, wasting no time in heading back where they’d come from.
Angelika saw something white and trembling in front of her and at length realized that it was her own hand. She thought that perhaps it would be appropriate to vomit but the physical urge to do so was not in fact upon her. Feeling the cold of the muck she lay in, she wrenched herself up to a sitting position, even though this meant painfully craning her neck.
She could not believe it. The boy hadn’t given her away.
Angelika would have to wait a good lo
ng time to be sure there would be no more orcs coming.
It had been a certainty to her that the boy would point the finger. She had it all pictured in her head and everything. She was all prepared for what to do next.
She leaned her head against the wood of the cart, letting her breathing slow. She reached up to her face with dirty fingers and felt something wet coming down from her eyes. She assumed it would be blood, from some wound she hadn’t noticed getting, but when she looked at her fingers there was no red liquid. So it must have only been tears.
It was sad, she supposed, that the orcs would torture and mutilate and for all she knew even eat the boy. He had turned out to be better than the norm. But there was certainly nothing she could do about it. Or should do. She understood the world better than he.
She stood on a granite promontory, up in the hills, looking down at the massed orcs as they moved down south through the pass, back into the border reaches. The walls of mountain rock on both sides gathered up and magnified the grunting and chanting of the orcs below. It felt like they were groaning right into her ear. But she was safe from them; she would look like just a speck, up here, and they were occupied with their unruly march.
The mud was drying already. She looked at a big cake of it on her outer thigh and smacked it off. Idly she wondered which side had initiated the battle in the first place, the patrolling Imperials or the invading orcs. It did not really matter, but Max, to whom she would sell her catch, maintained an interest in military matters and liked to know these things. He said he was writing a book, which he wasn’t, but Angelika could get a slightly better price on her wares by humouring him. Even so, she did not know what she was waiting for. She could glean no further information for Max by watching the orcs now. Even though they held great torches aloft—tree trunks, wrapped in looted cloth and dipped in flammable pitch, each carried by three or four straining, stumbling orcs—details were hard to make out. Maybe an expert on orcs could look down and find signs to interpret, but Angelika had no interest in becoming an expert on orcs.
She turned to go and then stopped. She turned back, to see more clearly what she had just seen, in the corner of her eye. Emerging from a blind spot behind a rock outcropping was a huge cart. Angelika had to pause and compare it with the size of the figures around it to get an accurate sense of its scale. Its wheels—she counted a dozen, then recounted and corrected the figure to ten—were greater in diameter than the height of any nearby orc. Its surface was a flat platform of long planks, somewhere between eighty and one hundred feet long. It boasted neither rails nor sides. Over a hundred sweating, bare-backed orcs, suffering under the lashes of multiple drivers, pitched forward in a series of great, uneven lurches, dragging it behind them. In the middle of the cart there towered an enormous wooden figure. The figure, depicting an orc with gaping mouth and antlered helmet, terminated at the waist, which was flush with the planks of the cart. It looked hollow, like it had been knocked together with nails and scraps of board. The eyes on its squarish face were set on different levels, and several of its large, triangular teeth had already fallen loose and were dangling from the round cave of its stupidly open mouth. Angelika could not tell if the splotches of dark on the figure’s surface were paint or dung or mildew.
Her knees felt unsteady, and a voice at the back of her head told her to run, but Angelika kept looking at the thing, confident in the half mile of distance between them. The big figure had only one arm, and this was a separate, levering piece, attached with a big wooden pin to its shoulder. This moveable arm terminated in a great round hammer, its striking surface easily eight, perhaps even ten, feet in diameter. Chains held it up, in ready position. Angelika, squinting, thought she could make out a pulley contraption set into the platform of the cart, to which the chains were fixed.
Several dozen orcs, all tiny to her eyes, milled around the figure. One in particular seemed larger than the rest, and stood at the cart’s forward edge, fists at hips, watching the slave orcs as they strove to yank his conveyance onward. She saw that his foot stood on something, and that the something was moving.
It was a familiar, squirming sack, dyed purple and splotchy, its drawstring now trailing down over the lip of the cart.
So they had not killed the boy yet. It did not take brilliant deduction to realize that the orcs intended to perform some kind of ceremony involving their big crude statue. It would entail placing Franziskus under the hammer’s shadow, then loosing the chains, so it would fall upon him, pounding him to paste.
Angelika turned to go. Now she had an interesting fact to share with Max for his imaginary book. It would not be necessary to stay and watch the ceremony. She could imagine the results with sufficient vividness. She crept quietly along the flattish projection of rock she’d been standing on and down to a trail through the brush and bramble. The trail forked two ways, up towards a mountain switchback, or down the face of the hill to the pass. Up around the mountain lay her route to town, and Max, and her money and a hot drink and a softish bed.
She took the trail’s downward leg. Angelika had never heard of a thing like the statue. Maybe she could make some more money by making a sketch of it, to sell to scholars or something. Max would know of such scholars, perhaps. They were the sorts of people he was always drinking with. Angelika had heard maybe that there was a market for information. It would be especially true, wouldn’t it, when it was information on the Empire’s most dangerous enemies? Yes, she was pretty sure of it. So, the reason she was getting closer was to make a sketch. For the money.
Stunted, leathery-leafed trees lined the trail, and Angelika kept low behind them. It was not hard to match the cart’s slow progress. If anything, Angelika, the thumps of her heart radiating up through her chest, wanted it to go faster.
A dried, weedy branch reached out to caress her, leaving a line of burrs hanging from her leggings.
She would not do anything foolish, she told herself.
She pulled the back of her hand across her forehead, wiping sweat away.
Maybe you could say, in some sense, that the boy deserved rescuing, but she would not allow herself to be tempted towards such stupidity.
Drumming started up, somewhere in the distance, and echoed across the walls of rock.
There were hundreds of orcs around, maybe more, and any one of them could kill you with a single blow.
A rock rolled out from under Angelika’s foot as she put it down on the path, and she windmilled her arms to try to keep her balance. She crashed into one of the low, bushy trees, grabbing a branch for support. Its bark felt greasy.
Especially that biggest of the orcs, up on the cart, standing over Franziskus. That one could kill you with a single dull fingernail.
Up ahead, she saw that her path dead-ended. The pass widened out, and the trail went right down to its flat bottom. She could stay put, clamber back up the incline through sharp rocks and boulders, or continue on to where the orcs were. She stayed put, cursing her folly.
She heard whip cracks and orcish shouts and looked over to see that the cart drivers were trying to get the haulers stopped. Some at the front had halted, while others behind them trudged peevishly onwards. A pileup began, and the haulers began to push and shove at each other. One particularly large specimen, pushed from behind by a humpbacked, dull-eyed orc, turned and opened his maw wide, exposing his tusks and sending a great spray of spittle back towards his tormentor. A third orc, beside the humpback, squinted as spare sputum hit him, then lurched forward to clamp thick, horny fingers over the larger orc’s lower jaw. He pulled downwards, smashing his victim with his spare fist. Haulers all around these two joined in, limbs flying, jaws gnashing, as the drivers up on the cart directed their whips into the brawling mass. A small chunk of something fleshy and greenish sailed out from the tangle of brawling orcs. Angelika guessed it for a finger or possibly an ear.
Her shoulders seized up in warning as she heard something behind her. Twisting backwards, she saw a trio of orcs ma
king their way quickly down the trail, their eyes on the fight. They intended to join it, but unless she went somewhere, they would run right into her. They blocked her route back into the hills. Her only way was forwards, towards the greater mass of orcs. At least they were distracted.
Angelika leapt. She was in mid-air, sailing over the bushes. She hit the gravelly ground at ravine bottom. The wheels of the cart, now motionless, stood in front of her. She could hear screaming and growling, but no orcs were looking her way. They’d all be up at the front of the cart, where the fight was. She sprinted in between two of the tall, spoked wheels, rocks and pebbles spraying out behind her. Once under the cart, she looked for the best way to hide. The axles were high and wide enough that she could haul herself up on them, and maybe not be seen when the commotion died down up front. She chose an axle in the middle, which would give her more choices when she had to run. Angelika hefted herself up and laid herself out on her back, across the axle. It was not comfortable, but she could balance herself and was not in immediate danger of falling off. What would happen when the cart started moving again, she could not predict.
The sounds from up ahead were trailing off to yelping and isolated snarls, so Angelika could only guess that the orc leaders had violently snuffed out the brawl. She would be stuck here for a while, until the next distraction. This would probably occur after the cart started up again, and then reached its final destination. She could creep away then. This would teach her forever, she thought. She promised herself that the next time she saw someone being carried off to an awful fate, she would act true to her beliefs, and leave him to his destiny. She made a point of feeling the hardness of the axle as it dug into her spine; she would recall this sensation when next she got an imbecilic temptation to do otherwise.
She thought about possible escape routes. Both the brushy inclines on either side of the pass would be good ways to get out, so long as they remained free of orcs.
01 - Honour of the Grave Page 2
