Grunts

by Mary Gentle

  The clouds broke.

  Spiked and cusped armour encased Amarynth, each plate bright with pierced gold borders. As the Powers of the Air bowed to his command, the sun struck down through the pass, and he raised his arm, and his gauntlet took white flame.

  “Amarynth Firehand!” one of the elvish warriors cried, and the name was taken up through the massed ranks of the Light encampment. A silver trumpet rang out, high and clear, echoing from rockface to rockface, until it seemed a thousand armies stirred in the mountains. Amarynth vaulted, fully armoured, into the saddle of his caparisoned war-unicorn.

  “My part is done!” he cried. “Warriors of the Light, the next glory is yours!”

  He walked his horned mount over the broken outer defences, with the charging elves, dwarves, and Men. Evil witch-fires blazed and stuttered from the keep and the inner walls of Nin-Edin. Harsh orcish voices shrieked commands.

  The Paladin ignored them, staring down.

  Among the rubble lay twitching bundles. He dismounted and knelt by one. The orc soldier dribbled feebly and gazed up with eyes upon which cataracts had already formed. Age withered the bulging muscles, made the palsied claws shake. The mouth drooled, attempting to form words.

  “Her Grace did come upon me,” Amarynth said, satisfied.

  He remounted and rode on a few paces, picking his way through the rubble and the dozens of orcs dead of old age.

  “Die, motherfucker!”

  Sword in hand, Amarynth leaned down. An orc lay pinned under a masonry block. Obviously too far from the epicentre of magic to be affected, this orc was yet young. It spat through broken tusks and hurled a rock with its unbroken arm.

  “Poor creature!” The elf dismounted and, carefully keeping clear of the orc’s fangs, laid a gauntleted hand on its sweating brow. “Do you repent of your sins?”

  The uniformed orc coughed. It stared around at the hundreds of elf, dwarf, and Men warriors tramping up the hill, their bright swords dripping with the blood of the aged orcs caught in the outer walls’ wreckage.

  “Hell, yes! I repent, man. I repent! Take me prisoner—”

  A great pity welled up in Amarynth’s heart. He thrust his swordblade deep into the orc’s throat. The creature’s startled eyes dulled as it dribbled green blood.

  “I have saved your soul by sending you to a better world while you were in a state of grace. Who knows but that as a prisoner you might have fallen back into evil ways?”

  Masonry shards whipped through the air. Amarynth cast a casual fail-weapons spell at the prone, firing orcs farther up the hill. The orcs—he was close enough now to see their snarling, ugly features, their hunched bodies, and vile clothing—cursed and threw down their useless weapons.

  An authoritative orc voice shrieked. “Fall back by fire and movement!”

  The odd incantation meant nothing to Amarynth, skilled though he was in arcane lore. He watched the orcs run, led by a smaller orc in black, who limped.

  “Now,” he cried. “They run! Now, for the Light!”

  The Man infantry cheered, pounding their green-stained blades against their painted shields. Beams of sun shone on their mail-shirts and cloaks as they swarmed up the slope.

  Some orcs hid in cover and fired while other bands of orcs retreated; the retreating orcs would then stop in turn and begin to fire. Incomprehensible. The Paladin-Mage Amarynth cast fail-weapons spells to his left and right as he rode up the hill, head bare to the chill of the day.

  A skinny orc danced on the battlements of the inner walls. He frothed at the mouth as Amarynth stared up, the feathers and chains that ornamented him shaking and jangling.

  “I don’t need no orc wet-dream—

  Let me hear an elvish scream!”

  The red-bearded dwarf Kazra appeared suddenly from the rear of Nin-Edin, stomping through the bloody slush. “Lord Commander, they won’t take the bait. They won’t leave the inner walls and come out and fight us!”

  A slender elf Captain of Archers stepped forward and smiled. “Impossible, dwarf. Orcs always respond to taunting.”

  “They do?” Kazra stared up at the armed, uniformed orcs lining the crenellations. “Orcs! Cowardly scum!”

  A battered and bleeding albino-crested orc muttered, “You called?”

  “I believe I begin to comprehend their strange tongue, Lord Commander,” the engineer-mage said. She pointed up at a large orc. “Your mother wears combat boots, and pisses standing up!”

  An expression of confusion crossed the orc’s face. “Doesn’t everyone’s?”

  The dwarf’s face reddened with more than the icy cold. After a moment’s silence, the elf archer sang out, “All orcs are cowardly filth! You have not one true warrior amongst you!”

  Rows of silent, motionless orcs lined Nin-Edin’s inner walls. Amarynth saw no sign now of the strange witch-weaponry. Instead, the orcs swung axes and maces, gripped jagged swords and spears and spiked clubs.

  A small orc in black leaned over the battlements and met Amarynth’s gaze.

  “We lost a lot of people down there.” Its voice was guttural as it pointed to the demolished outer walls. “If you want us, elf, you’re gonna have to come in and take us!”

  “What is the matter with them, my lord?” The elf Captain of Archers squeaked in frustration. “These are orc warriors. They should charge out, tormented to fury by our very presence in front of them! Each tribe should seek to outdo the other by flinging themselves hopelessly into the midst of our fighting elves. Why do they not do this?”

  “What does it matter?” Amarynth shrugged. “Take the inner walls.”

  The commander of the Man infantry shuffled back, drawing a ragged breath. “Don’t give that order, my lord. I don’t think you’ll be obeyed.”

  “But we have them completely at our mercy!”

  “These aren’t like other orcs, my lord! They’re…they’re not natural! This isn’t what fighting orcs is like. Orcs run. Orcs are stupid. These orcs…”

  The dwarf Kazra, at the head of her halberdiers, grunted. “Maybe they’re right. This is some unnatural evil beyond our comprehension.”

  Amarynth Firehand bowed his head for a moment and then lifted it again. The sun, level through the clouds, sparked back in points of fire from his white harness. He drew a breath that sucked cold mountain air deep into his lungs.

  “This is mere foolery.”

  Casually, Amarynth gestured. A noise that seemed the earth’s own voice shook the world. It avalanched snow down from rockfaces further up the pass.

  The inner walls of Nin-Edin, moved by the Powers of Earth, shifted. Orcs howled as stone tottered. The inner gate split in two. The masonry arch cracked from top to bottom, the two halves by some freak happenstance remaining upright, leaving the portcullis jammed at an angle in the dirt, with space to pass on either side.

  “Oh, Lady,” Amarynth prayed, “since I may grow weary in the killing that now follows, send me yet more of your Grace—”

  FOOM!

  The thunderclap noise of the shot startled the war-unicorn. Amarynth reined it in. No pain came to him. He looked down. Unmarked.

  “My lord!”

  The Captain of Archers’ yell made him look down to where she knelt. The dwarf engineer-mage Kazra lay on the ground. Amarynth dismounted from the unicorn.

  “Kazra, fellow-warrior, what do you there?”

  The elf archer turned the dwarf over. Most of the dwarf’s face and the side of her head had been blown off. Blood and tissue and bone fragments glistened, matting her fiery hair.

  “Yo the snipers!”

  Amarynth fell to his knees, ignoring the orcs.

  “Lord Commander.” The Man infantry commander squatted down beside him. “A healing mage can—Ah. No.”

  Amarynth wiped his mouth, catching his lip painfully on the edge of his gauntlet, and fumbled to strip the armour off. The mountain air felt cold on his skin.

  He picked Kazra up. What remained of the dwarf’s head fell back across h
is arm. She had no mouth or jaw to fall open. Her weight made him stagger. Blood and the last of her sweat cooled on his hands, and the smallness and solidity of her body in her mail-shirt made him open his mouth and bawl like a child.

  “My lord!” the archer protested.

  Amarynth Firehand turned and picked his way down the hill. He stumbled, his knees giving way under him. The sun shone full in his eyes now. Water dripped down his face, ran off his chin, soaked his surcoat. Although nothing short of a miracle would do, he muttered healing charms constantly.

  The dwarf did not move between the time he took her from the wall and the time he laid her down in the rich furnishings of his own bed, in his own tent. He sat by her, bent over, watching for the slightest breath, the slightest motion, to tell him he might be wrong, that Kazra was only wounded.

  Some time later, when it became apparent even to him that the dwarf was dead, Amarynth Firehand got stiffly up from the bed and left the tent.

  His commanders awaited him outside.

  “Bury her in stone,” the elf said. “What was it all for? She was my oldest friend. I shall never say anything more to her. Not even farewell.”

  “Lord Commander,” the Captain of Archers ventured, “what of the fort?”

  “Leave me.” Amarynth turned back to his tent. “I am going to pray until I can find it in my heart to forgive the orcs for Kazra. Then we shall take Nin-Edin and raze it to the ground.”

  7

  The ravaged countryside teems not only with deserters but also with the Light.

  Driven out of the arctic safety of the Demonfest Mountains, Ashnak hooded his eyes against the winter wind. The stench of corpses made his broad nostrils flare. The SUS marine ahead of him looked back and signalled thumbs-down: enemy seen or suspected.

  “That’s two wandering Light war-bands we’ve run into in two days. Still mopping up after the Last Battle. Lugashaldim, tell the orcs to exercise all caution, but to make their best speed.”

  “Sir, yes sir!” The Undead marine corporal, black-clad and carrying a hefty commando knife in his rotting hand, doubled over and ran up through the cover of a burned orchard towards the rest of the unit.

  “Are you sure we can trust these orcs, sir?”

  Ashnak stopped peering through the fallen, burned tree trunks and stared at the female orc beside him. “Of course you can’t trust them, Marine Razitshakra. They’re orcs!”

  “No, sir. I mean ideologically, sir.” She wrenched a paperback book from her combats, waving it in an ink-stained hand. “If we’re going to be the vanguard of the proletariat and massacre the oppressing classes—elves and Men, halflings, dwarves; that kind of filth—we have to be sure of everybody, sir, don’t we?”

  Razitshakra adjusted her rimless spectacles and gave Ashnak a long, hard stare.

  “Vanguard of the what?” Ashnak took the dog-eared paperback. “The what Manifesto? I’ve warned you before about reading, marine. Just take it from me, we’re thoroughly—what is it?—ideologically correct.”

  Razitshakra gave him a knowing look, a smile, and a deliberately sharp salute. “Sir, yes sir.”

  “And you can take this from me, too.”

  Ashnak grabbed the orc marine by the back of her combats, swung her bodily around his head and let go. Razitshakra’s chunky body flew a short distance and whacked into a tree. She slid to the earth.

  “You can free all the oppressed masses you like,” Ashnak grinned, “provided you remember orcish political ideology. That is—I’m in charge. I am a big, hard bastard and you take my orders. When I say Jump! you don’t say Yessir and you don’t say How high? You say General, when do I come down? Got that?”

  Razitshakra clawed her way up the tree and back onto her feet, muttering, “Yessir, that’s what I said, sir, isn’t it, sir?”

  “You might defy gravity, but you won’t defy me!” He clapped the marine on the back as she attempted to adjust her rimless spectacles. His grip abruptly tightened. “Take cover! I hear more riders.”

  His unit went to ground. The next few minutes spent at a low crawl brought Ashnak, alone, to where he could peer down off the wooded ridge at the crowded countryside of Men. The Demonfest Mountains loomed to the east. A whole squad of orcs would undoubtedly be intercepted. A single orc on his own, however…

  A single orc, travelling alone, might sneak up into the foothills, double back north, make his way round the end of the mountain range, and vanish off into the Dark Lands of the East. Which, although conquered, were doubtless better for an orc’s health than being inside a mountain fort surrounded by the Light’s finest mages and warriors.

  Ashnak crawled down onto the very inviting goat trail that would backtrack up into the mountains.

  He bellied up to a hummock and slid over it.

  “Going somewhere, were we, sir?”

  The sharp whisper came from one of the Undead grunts surrounding Lugashaldim and Razitshakra. The female orc fixed a very chilly gaze on Ashnak. “Like you said, sir, we’d better make our best speed back to Nin-Edin.”

  Ashnak fingered his brass-capped tusks. A war-band of wild orcs might easily be persuaded out of returning to the fortress. He momentarily wished for a war-band of wild orcs, not orcs with the glint of marine in their eyes.

  Lugashaldim rasped, “Wouldn’t want to think Marukka had been right, sir, would we?”

  A great orc is tough, but a dozen Undead orcs together are conceivably tougher.

  When there is no other option, an orc keeps his promises.

  “Of course we’re going back, soldier.” Ashnak beamed expansively. “I was just scouting out the best route. Okay, marines. Harch!”

  In a countryside burned and ravaged by the Dark, but still occupied by uncountable Men, elves, and other hostile races, Ashnak’s Commandos sought desperate and elusive concealment on their way south.

  The fifteenth day of the siege dawns cold and clear.

  Work parties of Men and elves used picks to rapidly demolish the rubble of the outer walls of Nin-Edin. Winter light flooded the slope. Views of the mountain pass appeared where there had been only masonry. The smell of magic building up stung in the air, making orcs’ eyes and nostrils weep a thin mucus fluid.

  “They’re going to come right over us!” Corporal Ugarit, a flak jacket tied on over his ceramic and steel armour, stared down at the devastated inner walls, and the forces of Light behind earth-banks and wooden barricades. “It’s going to be soon! I’m going to die!”

  Barashkukor seized the skinny orc’s collar, dragged him down squat nostril to nostril, and spat into his face. “Be an orc, Ugarit! We’ll hold this fort to the last orc—the last enlisted orc, that is.”

  “He’s right, man…” Sergeant Varimnak smoked a thin roll of pipe-weed, the slit pupils of her eyes shrunk to vertical lines. She stood behind Barashkukor, AK47 slung across her back, a ragged strip of black cloth bandaging her shaven skull. “Fighting Agaku, man! Call in the artillery! Call in an airstrike!”

  “Will you listen?” The skinny orc corporal whimpered. “Every so often those guys down there stop waving flags and polishing their armour and realise they need only the simplest magic and we’re wiped out. They only have to stick that Amarynth motherfucker out in front for long enough, and they’re gonna come over these walls like a flash flood!”

  And at midnight:

  A close voice hissed out of the darkness, “Password Dagurashibanipal!”

  “Adva—” The orc marine sentry, fear and relief searing his nerves, raised the muzzle of his SA80 assault rifle. His finger accidentally closed on the trigger.

  A burst of automatic fire cut the darkness. The echo roared back from the keep walls. Muzzle flash strobed, outlining a figure hammered back by bullet impacts. It whirled and fell.

  The orc marine sentry whimpered and took a hesitant step forward, looking down at the supine body.

  “Dumbfuck!” The body sat up. It got to its feet. Corporal Lugashaldim glared at the hapless orc sentry.


  “Sir, sorry, sir! Accidental discharge, sir!” The guard cringed.

  “I’ll give you accidental discharge,” Lugashaldim snarled. The rounds had ripped his black combats to pieces and shot away most of his stomach and lower torso. He made a vain attempt to stuff his spilling intestines back inside his body cavity. They slid out.

  “Shit!” Lugashaldim shoved handfuls of slick white tubes up under his ribs. They slid out again. Muttering, he grabbed his intestines between two gnarled hands, ripped them and the colon off short, and threw the entire mess of tubes over his shoulders. It hit the keep wall and slopped to the flagstones.

  “You’re on a charge, marine! So’s your sentry partner, for being absent from duty.”

  The second guard, who had just finished a roll of pipe-weed in the gate-house, looked out dreamily, remarked “Fuck, we’ve been sussed!” and vanished back inside.

  “Any problems, Lugashaldim?” the orc general inquired, strolling out of the darkness beyond the broken walls with the remainder of the Undead marines.

  “No, sir, General Ashnak, sir! None that these fuckwitted, shit-stupid excuses for marines won’t regret from now until their dying day—and after.” Lugashaldim bared long teeth in a rotting grin and clapped the guard on the shoulder. “You know what they say, soldier. Join the marines, and see the world—join the SUS, and see the next…”

  A few moments later a sweating Barashkukor appeared out of the darkness. The orc major saluted his superior officer.

  “The mission, sir?” he enquired anxiously. “Was it a success? Do we have the talismans, sir?”

  Ashnak turned his heavy-jawed head back from surveying the ravaged fort. “Well,” he said, “not exactly…”

  The morning came white with frost.

  Will Brandiman rejoined his brother in the hills below Nin-Edin. He drew his grey-green concealing cloak back from the mail-shirt and helm that had made him a reasonable facsimile of the Light’s soldiers.