Orc

The dawn, and what was taken¶

The orcs were beautiful once. This is not orcish boasting. It is the central fact of their history and the origin of everything that came after.

What they were before is argued everywhere except among orcs. Elven scholars will tell you they were elves, a branch of the same trunk, and say it in the tone of a family denying a cousin. Human chroniclers claim them for men. A dwarf will grant only that they were fair, since the dwarves keep records and the old records agree on that much and on nothing else. The orcs have no position. The question requires a memory they no longer own.

Then a god took them apart.

Not a curse spoken over a field in an afternoon. Torture, and torture is work, and this was done slowly and by hand and it did not stop for generations. A people can be emptied that way. Everything they had went into it: the songs, the cities, the faces of their own dead, whatever they called themselves before anyone called them orcs. Pain will take all of it if you give it enough years. What was finally let go had green skin and burning eyes and two things left in the whole of its memory, which were the hurt and the hate of the hand that dealt it.

The rest never came back, and they have never once made peace with that. An orc does not carry his history as a wound that closed. He carries it as scarring that still pulls, every day, in a body that was shaped to be something else. The green is scar tissue. The tusks are scar tissue. The rage is what a scar does when you ask it to move.

And there is no one left to ask what was lost, which is the cruelty inside the cruelty, and the orcs know it, and it is the thing they will not forgive.

A punishment that became a method¶

So they built on the only ground left them. You cannot raise a people on a beautiful past you cannot remember. You can raise one on the capacity to go on being hit, and no people alive has been given more practice.

Strength above all else. Every camp a proving ground, every hard season a test that some clan fails publicly, and no orcish community anywhere has ever organised itself around the assumption that things will be gentle.

Outsiders see the clan oaths and take them for barbarism, then read them and take them for law. They are both. The oaths are intricate, binding, older than most human kingdoms, and enforced with a precision that would embarrass an Aethrassian magistrate. An orc who breaks one is not punished. He is simply no longer anyone, and no orc will say his name to fill the silence. Loyalty is the one thing the torture failed to burn out, and they have not been careless with it since.

Clans, and the largest of the confederations¶

Orcs organise by clan, and a clan is the only unit that is never in question. Everything above it is an arrangement, and arrangements are made and unmade.

The Laeroth are the largest of those arrangements by a wide margin, an alliance of sworn clans big enough that foreign chanceries have taken to using the name for the whole race. It is a mistake, and one Laeroth war-speakers enjoy correcting. There are orc clans on three coasts that have never sworn to them, hill villages that answer to nobody, and rival confederations whose entire founding grievance is a Laeroth oath they refused. An orc is not Laeroth by being an orc. He is Laeroth because somebody swore, and swearing is a thing you can decline.

Why they do not pray¶

Idurism holds that gods are lies, that life carries no meaning of its own, and that everything around us is canvas for the art of dying.

Every clause of it is testimony. Something did that, for that long, to them, and called itself holy while it worked. So the divine is a lie, and the priests of it are liars or fools, and there is no god anywhere in Valdrin that an orc will hear a good word about. They do not sort them. Sacred Light, ancestor, harvest spirit, whatever a pilgrim wants to name: all of it goes in the same pile, all of it is the same appetite wearing a better face, and the orcs are the only people who have seen what that face is for. A world that permits such a thing does not run on meaning, so there is none to go looking for. What is left is the dying, and if that is all there is then it may as well be done with craft. The Idurist morticians are not morbid. They are finishing the only work the orcs were left with.

Missionaries hear despair in this and arrive expecting to comfort somebody. It is not despair. It is a verdict, returned in full knowledge of the evidence, by the one people in Valdrin who can say they believed in something and got an answer.

We knew a god. We remember the terms. Go home.

Answer given by a Laeroth war-speaker to a missionary of the Sacred Light

The thing their enemies keep failing to price¶

No people in Valdrin bears children as readily as the orcs, and none bears them as fast.

Dwarven holds keep centuries of casualty rolls from the mountain wars and can tell you to the name how many orcs they have killed. What the rolls do not record, because no dwarf cares to write it down, is that the orcs had already replaced every one of them, and more besides, while the hold was still carving the letters.

In your settlement¶

An orcish workforce grows faster than any other you could raise, and eats in proportion. Strong, fierce, tireless, cheap to recruit and relentlessly expensive to feed.

Loyalty within the clan is absolute. Loyalty to you is a translation problem, and you will spend the entire life of the colony working on the translation. Offer them a shrine and you will be asked, politely the first time, what you think it is for.

Nearly every other people tolerates them poorly, elves and dwarves worst of all, and those grudges arrive fully grown on the first morning. A mixed settlement with orcs in it wants a wage policy, a food surplus, and a plan already written for the day the Purists find a spokesman.