Orc And The Lastborn [Progression, Gunpowder Sword & Sorcery]

She braced against the gunwale as the foredeck dumped them forward. Beside her Orc gripped a foreshroud in his outstretched hand and planted a boot against the capstan. The marbled sea slid opposite their falling and in the momentary valley of the swell the sails luffed and the timbers groaned and the jacks scurried across the deck to their tasks. Wash ran to the scuppers aft as the ship angled back and began to climb toward the wide open sky. Not a cloud to be seen there nor any other explanation for the twenty foot seas but the scattered detonations of meteors and the great swollen body of the now trebled moon. They crested the next summit and the madland coast reappeared and while the others looked on she watched only him. The way his eyes roved its wavering red line as if searching for some sign of life in that arid waste. Some sign of the friends he had left there or of the mending he had hoped to wright with the orcstone. Spray spattered his face and he flinched against it yet kept his eyes ever on the shore until the prow plummeted off the edge of the wave and they began to descend again.

"Ye had enough of this?" she said.

"Feel free to go below."

"Ye intend te stay here til we debark don't ye."

"I can't afford to miss something."

She looked at the coast. "Lad I don't think there's anythin te miss."

They bottomed out the swell and the figurehead, some sort of snarling dog, plowed under the sea and sent cold water crashing over them both. Everything pitched forward suddenly and she felt sick and then everything righted and began to ascend out of the wave bottom and as they came over the top the wind shivered her through her soaked clothes. Away left she saw the notch in the cliff wall that was the maw of their great river and overhead she heard the shouts of sailors in the rigging mixed with the raucous calls of gulls hovering placidly about the bucking ship. The bowspirit yawed some points to the right and would soon leave behind this doomed land for its northerly destination.

"I can stand with ye," she said.

He nodded, water tailing off his chin.

Down and up they went. The seamen changing watch at midday yet the dwarf and the orc did not leave their vigil: his over the land and hers over him. In the evening as the sun set over the desert and a red stain inked up the sky they saw the shipwreck half awash in the flood of the unusual tide and they saw the choppy cove in which they had each separately departed for this destiny almost two years past. The Stranger now hove for this anchorage.

"Ye think they know we're comin?"

He nodded at a prominence overlooking the sea. "Someone will be posted there."

She squinted at the crown of it. A black fist in the reddening night. "I wish we had the captain's scope."

"They'll be there."

From the quarterdeck the bosun tolled the bell. Sailors moved about. The daylight continued its scarlet fading.

"Mym," called a voice.

She half turned to it. She looked at Orc. His eyes fixed to the shadowed shore, the ridgeline stark above it.

"Mym."

"You better go," he said.

"Come on with me."

"I'm alright."

"Ye sure?"

He said nothing.

"A man losin his home loses himself."

He turned to her. "Where'd you hear that?"

"Was somethin Dara's old da said."

He looked back to land. "This isn't my home," he said. "And I'm not a man."

"Aye that's so."

"Someone will be there."

"I'm sure they will."

***

That night found her aboard a skiff. Daraway sat beside her. The sea ran high and slopped against the flared hull and onto their shoulders and thighs. Overhead the stars fell in unceasing droves and their common blazing pulsed the dark out of the night and revealed to her the world. A pair of barefooted seamen hauling on the oars. The woman Jackal sitting at the skeg tiller. A second skiff following in the undulate whitecaps of the ever widening wake. By the meteoric light she could just make out Orc kneeling on its foredeck and clutching its breasthook to steady himself. She couldn't see the greenskin over the dark bulk of him but whenever the second skiff rolled from one wave to the next the bosun came into view in its transom.

"Are you feeling any better?" said Daraway.

"Some."

"That's good."

"Not lookin forward te voyagin back."

The woman turned her head east to the brightening horizon whence a waning gibbous was soon to come. "May it be swifter than the way here."

"Aye." Mym nodded away south. "Ye see the desert back there?"

"I did."

"It doesn't look te be comin back."

"No it doesn't."

"Ye know Orc spent months workin it over."

"I know."

"Ye said the orcstone could mend anythin."

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"Maybe it's no fault of the stone."

Mym looked at the woman.

"The armiger poisoned the land and the water," said Daraway. "As far as I know the poison is still there."

"Orc know that?"

"He does now."

"Someone's got te get it out."

"Yes."

"Ye think he'll want te stay?"

"Yes."

"Ye think we should let him?"

Daraway nodded. "I do."

Mym frowned. She turned and looked back at the second skiff and at the orc at its prow. She felt Daraway's hand on her knee.

"He can take care of himself you know," said the woman.

"Aye, but he doesn't."

"What do you want to do?"

"I don't know." She turned back to Daraway. "We should've brought it with us."

"It's safe under the mountain."

Jackal thumped the hull with the flat of her hand. "Ready there," she said.

"Aye," said one of the oarsmen.

"Ship."

The oarsmen lifted their oars out of the water and retracted them to their locks.

"Beach."

The oarsmen hopped over the gunwales and ran the skiff up the sand. Jackal jumped off of the back and slogged up through the surging and riptiding surf. The passengers debarked and the second skiff skudded up alongside.

"I can't stay here long with these goddamn false tides," Jackal told the others.

"You mean with your freight spoiling," said the bosun.

"Ain't ye got a sibyl's eye."

"You must stay," said Daraway. "We won't be long and we can't afford any delays."

"Gold don't tarnish but ain't ye smell it rottin away?"

"Smells better than the inside of the cell."

"Lordy knew ye'd be holdin that over me neck."

"We won't be long."

"Long's a turn. A chain ain't long to a sailor ashore but it's twice an eternity to a lubber overboard. Four watches?"

"Twenty."

"Twenty has me down and shipped at Here First. Say forty and I'll post back freshly loaded."

"Twenty watches Jackal."

The ship captain shook her head. "Twenty watches leave with the sea goin stranger than a salt dervish and naught else to busy me crew, and them all the while smellin their shares seepin out the casks below." She looked at the bosun. "Ye've a way with the tars and spars. Stay on with me and keep thems before the mast limber and snappin."

The bosun turned a shade and it seemed as though he could not speak. He looked at Orc.

"Stay if you want," said Orc.

"And if you run into that elf again?"

"That won't happen."

"Then you best consider it a certainty."

"I won't be alone this time."

"You weren't alone last time."

Orc laid his hand on the bosun's shoulder. "It's alright. You can go."

"Just for forty watches," said Jackal.

"Twenty," said Daraway.

The ship captain smiled. "Aye, twenty. A halfpenny share for them and another halfpenny if you sign on after."

Mym watched the bosun and the captain shake on it and she watched Orc turn again to the bluff overlooking the strand. His eyes wide in the gathering dark. The sailors retreated to their skiffs and Jackal and the bosun went with them, but Orc said no goodbyes.

***

They arrived in the shorthorn's camp the following day. A one armed brownskin weird awaited them, standing alone over a ring of embers. She humbled herself before Orc and greeted him with the title "Nizam," and at that word the greenskin's head snapped up and he stared at Orc.

Orc grabbed her by the nape of her neck and placed her back on her feet. He spoke to her quickly. She cackled and said some things back in the manner of orckin. She looked at Mym and said more.

"What's she sayin?" said Mym.

"She welcomes you who cut her free," sad Orc.

"And me woman friend?"

He looked at her. "I wouldn't ask."

"Weren't yer friends supposed te be here?"

"Yeah."

Mym turned as if she had somehow missed them coming in. "Where they at?"

"I'm not sure."

He spoke again to the weird. She gestured wildly south with her one arm and whatever she was saying agitated the greenskin for he crept nearer and nearer and had begun to stamp the ground with his little feet. Finally the weird cackled again and she withdrew to a limb and hide hovel at the far edge of the camp and disappeared inside.

Orc turned first to the greenskin. "Yew Nizam now?"

"No."

"Then yew ain't keepin little me here."

"I wouldn't dare."

"No yew wouldn't."

"Go and find your brudder."

"I will. Eat good Orc."

"Eat good."

The greenskin turned and left the camp south. He crossed land that had been furrowed and watered in which nothing would grow, in which there were thousands of corvid tracks. Orc watched him go until he disappeared from the clearing and into the husks of the trees.

"What's happened?" said Mym.

"They went south," he said.

"All of them?"

"All but the seer."

"What's south?"

"A spread we turned over last year."

"Fer growin?"

"That was the hope."

"When they comin back?"

"Not til after harvest, if at all."

She nodded. "I'm sorry ye missed em."

"It's alright. I'll see them after we see the mother about her elfstone."

"Ye intendin te stay then?"

"Yeah. I think so."

"How many of them are there?"

He shook his head. "Not many."

"Ye want they could come te the mountain."

He looked at her as if unsure of her earnestness. "That's generous of you to offer. But down south, down in the Madlands, that's their home."

"And is it yers?"

"It could be." He turned back to the fire. "I'm not sure."

"Aye. That's alright."

"The seer says it's coming back. Better than I'd hoped."

"That's good te hear."

"The Mad had a spring run of chinook. The first one since we freed it."

"That's somethin."

"Yeah. I don't know. I hoped the orcstone would do more. Work the same magnitudes it had upon us."

"Ye expected te see hundred foot palms and dates so thick on the ground ye'd have te roll hither and thither te get around."

"Something like that."

"I'll tell ye somethin grayback, somethin ye learn from livin lek a mountain. Yer kind may raise up and burn down across a score of years and in that yer little different than humans, but trees lek these raise up across a score of centuries. Riverways raise up across a score of eons."

The weird lurched out of her abode and dug through some burlap sacks of seed and dipped a ladle into a cistern of fiber and mud and drank deeply from its sedimented contents. She retrieved some things from a pile of blankets and skittered up before Orc, bowed low, solitary hand outheld with thumb around a flintbladed knife and with two fingers hooked into an overturned and hollowed out human skull. She spoke. Orc answered.

"What's she doin?" said Mym.

"She wants to make a divination."

Mym remembered the last time she'd seen this power of the orcs. She remembered the outcomes of the prophesying, her own yet unrealized.

"What's she need fer it?"

"Time we don't have."

Now Daraway came up holding some instrument borrowed from the ship captain. Brass tubes and polished glass and fine numbering. It reminded Mym of her uncle's theodolite. The woman held it firmly in her hand. "Excuse me," she said to the weird who could not understand her.

The weird gnashed a eyetooth at her but gave ground.

"What is it?" said Mym.

"Serniccupo. If the moon keeps growing at this rate then it'll soon fill the entire sky."

"The entire sky?"

Daraway nodded. Orc's eyes glinted out of the fire to look at her. Then he looked away east, back to the sea, back to where the moon had risen round and fat and bright. He cut suddenly out of the firelight and Mym watched him stride here and there in the murk, to the sacks of seed, to the cistern. She was about to ask him what he was doing when the weird suddenly clamped the skull between her shoulder and cheek and set to clattering her knife within its orbital socket.

"Foretelling," said the weird in the pygmy of the camps. "Foretelling for beardling." She hooked her finger in the nasal cavity and swung over the cap of the skull and poked it against Mym's stomach.

"Leave off that," said Mym.

"Foretelling of heavens."

"Go on then."

The weird leaned in. "Nizam will leave beardling. Nizam will leave all."

Mym's eyes sought Orc but she didn't see where he'd gone. "That's not much of a tellin."

"Nizam will slay beardling."

Mym looked at Daraway then back at the weird. "Don't ye need some offerin te make yer divinations?"

The weird tapped the skull with the twisted nail of her thumb. "Beardling must sacrifice."

"Fine."

"Hold."

Mym took the offered skull and held it in a hand before her. Still she looked about for Orc.

"Mym!" cried Daraway.

Suddenly the weird was thrusting at her belly with the shard of flint. She brought up the skull to deflect the blow but Daraway beat her to it. The flint sliced the woman's forearm up to her elbow. The open wound steamed in the night.

The weird made a hissing sound and snatched the skull from Mym. She thrust it out to collect Daraway's blood. Then she made her prophecy.