An Orc on the Wild Side

by Tom Holt

  Take, for example, his flagship universal healthcare programme—

  “No,” he said. “And that’s final.”

  The Chairgoblin of the Apothecaries’ Guild scowled at him. “It’s traditional.”

  “I know. That’s why it’s got to stop. From now on, you get paid in money, or not at all.”

  There was an awkward silence. From time immemorial, goblin surgeons and apothecaries had been remunerated in the old-fashioned way: a flat fee of fivepence if they cured the patient, or the carcass if they didn’t. “Where’s the incentive in that?” the Chairgoblin said angrily. “Threepence an hour, regardless of whether they get better or not? I mean, why bother?”

  Mordak counted to five under his breath. “All your patients die,” he pointed out. “And then you eat them. Admit it, that’s not an ideal system.”

  The Chairgoblin was shocked. “That’s social responsibility, that is,” he said. “By weeding out the sick and infirm, we’re making an invaluable contribution to the future of the species.”

  “Threepence an hour,” Mordak said firmly, “and no more amputations for ingrowing toenails. You want drumsticks, you buy them in the market like everybody else. Next.”

  Next was the Defence Committee. Mordak glanced at the agenda and sighed. “All right,” he said, “would somebody care to explain to me why we’re at war with the dwarves again?”

  A thickset goblin in troll-scale armour shuffled his feet. “They started it.”

  “Of course they did. What did they do this time?”

  The goblin stuck out his chest. “They failed to comply with an ultimatum to evacuate Grid Section 34992/XP/239 by the date specified.”

  “Fine.” Mordak unrolled a map and peered at it. It was a sad but undeniable fact that the Dark Eyesight wasn’t getting any better as time went by. The humans, so he’d heard, had these bits of ground glass you stuck in your eye, and it helped you see better. Sounded promising. Goblins had something similar, of course, but designed to achieve the opposite effect. “Hold on,” he said. “Did you say 239?”

  “Sir.”

  “According to this map, that’s the guest wing of King Drain’s palace.”

  The goblin shrugged. “It’s directly above one of our main supply tunnels,” he said. “If they were to neglect it and it all caved in, our ability to transport vital materiel from the depot to the front-line tunnels would be seriously compromised.”

  “Just a second.” Mordak fiddled about with a ruler and a pair of dividers. “By directly above, you mean separated by a thousand feet of solid rock.”

  “Solid at the moment, sir,” the goblin said. “All it’d take would be a bit of water erosion and some tectonic shift and we’d be staring disaster in the face. Much better to act now, sir, from a position of relative strength.”

  Mordak closed his eyes for a moment. “Oh, come on,” he said. “We only just managed to patch things up after the last war. They wiped the floor with us.”

  “I did say relative strength, sir. Who knows, in five thousand years’ time they could be ten times stronger than us, instead of just three, like they are now. That’s why we should strike now, sir, while we’ve got the chance.”

  “Scribe.”

  A bored-looking Elf sprawling in a chair to his left took a pencil from behind her ear. “What?”

  “Write a nice polite letter to King Drain reassuring him that we have no hostile intentions and that we hope he wasn’t unduly alarmed by our April Fools message.”

  “It’s September.”

  “Backdate it.”

  The Elf shrugged and went back to her newspaper. That was one area, at least, in which he could reasonably claim to have succeeded; there were now Elves living (for longer than ten minutes) and working in Goblinland, performing such essential administrative functions as reading, writing and adding up, and making a valuable contribution to goblin society. True, they were if anything even more insufferable than they’d been before the great rapprochement—there’s nothing like living and working with a species, they delighted in saying, for confirming all your deeply entrenched prejudices—but at least they were here, tolerated and uneaten, and someone was doing the paperwork and telling him where he was supposed to be and when.

  “All right,” Mordak said to the Defence goblins, “you lot clear off, and try not to start any more wars without at least telling me. Next.”

  Ah yes, the civil engineering programme. New roads, bridges, infrastructure of all kinds, just what was needed to create jobs and boost sustainable economic growth—

  “What do you mean, you’ve stopped work?”

  The chief engineer shrugged. “Can’t get the materials.”

  “For a road? Oh, come on.”

  “It’s not just any road, is it?” the engineer retorted. “It’s a road from the State ordnance factory to the principal supply depot at G’nash G’vork.”

  “I know that. It’s so we can move cartloads of iron ore on the flat, instead of having to go up three levels and then back down again.”

  “Ah,” said the engineer. “But if you look at the map, see, there’s this half-mile section here that goes straight past the royal palace, right?”

  “Well, yes. I don’t mind. Roads have got to be built. I’m not one of those not-in-my-backyard whiners who—”

  “Yes, Your Majesty, but with all due respect you’re missing the bloody point. If it goes past the palace, you might walk on it.”

  Mordak’s head was starting to hurt. “There is that chance, yes. So?”

  “So,” said the chief engineer, “everybody knows, the King of the Goblins tramples on the bleached bones of his mortal enemies, it’s traditional. You can’t just go walking about on tarmac. You got your royal dignity to think of.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “So,” the engineer ground on, “if we’re going to build this stupid road, it’s got to be bones, and the thing of it is, there just aren’t enough of ’em to go round. You aren’t executing enough mortal enemies, all due respect. So, either you start chopping off a few more heads, or we’re going to have to reroute to bypass the palace area altogether, which’ll mean digging seven miles through solid rock and coming out here”—he stabbed at the map with a splintered foretalon—“which is three levels down, so you’d need a bloody great big embankment here, and if you’re going to have to do all that, I ask you, where’s the bloody point?”

  Mordak looked down at his hand. He’d just bitten clean through one of his own claws. Never mind. “You know what,” he said, “you’re quite right.”

  “I am?”

  “Yes. And I’m a fool not to have thought of it before. Silly me. What we need, obviously, is a whole lot more executions.”

  The engineer grinned. “Now you’re talking. There’s the Highways Committee, for a start. Chop the lot of ’em and who’d ever notice?”

  “Quite,” Mordak said. “But that’s still only, what, thirty yards’ worth of bones. Whereas your department—just offhand, round numbers, how many goblins have you got working for you in Construction? Yourself included.”

  “Um.”

  “Got to be at least seven thousand. That’s, let me see, best part of half a mile. Which would cover the stretch of road that goes past the palace just nicely.”

  “Yes, but—”

  Mordak smiled. “I know,” he said. “You’re going to point out that you and your colleagues aren’t my mortal enemies, and therefore not suitable for deployment as roadmaking material. Isn’t that right?”

  The engineer seemed to be having difficulty speaking, but he could still nod his head.

  “That’s what I thought,” Mordak said. “Because in order for someone to be my mortal enemy, he’d have to do something to get me seriously annoyed, like making difficulties, or deliberately holding up one of my pet projects, or not doing as he’s damn well told. Agreed?”

  “Anything you say, boss.”

  “Which you would never dream of doing, it goe
s without saying. So, that’s fine. Oh, and by the way, did I ever tell you how I feel about concrete?”

  “Boss.”

  “I hate concrete. One of these days I’m going to have all the concrete in Goblinland rounded up, stood against a wall and shot. And then I’m going to dance on its shattered rubble. Get the picture?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Good man. Down with concrete. Death to aggregates. Two, four, six, eight, they’re the stuff we really hate. Now get on with it. Next.”

  Next was the president of the Equality Commission. And, he had to admit, just for once, here was someone in charge of something who’d actually made an effort. Just, perhaps, a trifle misguided.

  “It says here,” Mordak said, “you’ve had nine hundred and forty goblins arrested and their feet cut off. Is that right?”

  “Nine hundred and forty-six.”

  “I stand corrected. Out of interest, why?”

  “They weren’t equal.”

  You know that feeling of having just walked into a plate glass door? “Excuse me?”

  “It says in the Universal Declaration of Goblin Rights,” the president said patiently, “henceforth, all goblins are to be equal. Well, they weren’t.”

  “Um?”

  “Too tall. So, we shortened them a bit. The mean average height of an adult goblin is forty-nine-point-seven inches, so—”

  “Ah.” Mordak nodded. “So presumably the reason why you locked up eight thousand goblins in a dungeon with no food for a month—”

  The president nodded. “Too heavy. The mean average weight—”

  “Yes, all right.” Mordak drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. “And the ones you had squashed between two huge slabs of stone were too wide, I think I get the picture. May I ask, what definition of equal are you using as your point of reference?”

  The president frowned. “You told me, look it up. So I did. It means being the same in quantity, size or amount. So I looked up size, and it said—”

  “Mphm.” Mordak took a strangely shaped metal object from the baggy sleeve of his black robe, polished it on his cuff and balanced it carefully on the arm of the throne. “Come on, S’nrrg, it’s me you’re talking to. I know you. You’re doing this to be awkward, aren’t you?”

  “What, me? Perish the—”

  “You and all the rest of them. You don’t like the reform package, you’ve never really got behind the core values of New Evil, and you’re trying to make me look like an idiot. Well?”

  The president looked at the metal thing, then at Mordak, then back at the thing. “All right, so me and some of the lads don’t hold with all this new stuff. But we’re loyal goblins. Dead loyal. We’re just doing like you said. Honest.”

  “S’nrrg, I wouldn’t trust you if we were sitting under a clock and you told me the time. The question I always ask myself before I appoint someone to high public office is, is this man more scared than bolshie? I think I may have misjudged you, old friend.” He smiled. “I admire you for that. You’ve got to take your hat off to someone who’s prepared to die horribly for what he believes is right.”

  “Honest, boss, I never—”

  “Of course,” Mordak went on, picking up the metal thing and turning it slowly in his hand, as if trying to find the sweet spot, “if I could convince myself that you were capable of true, sincere cowardice, not just a bit frightened but genuinely terrified out of your—”

  He paused and glanced down. A dark, treacly pool had appeared around the president’s feet, and Mordak could smell the sharp fumes of dissolving marble. He nodded and put the metal thing back in his sleeve. “In that case,” he said, “I might feel justified in giving you a second chance. Well? What do you reckon?”

  “Oh, I think so, boss,” the president whimpered. “I mean, why not? Just for the hell of it.”

  “Quite.” Mordak gave him a warm smile. “In that case, I suggest we start by amending article one of the Declaration so that it says something like equal rights and opportunities for all goblins, regardless of age, size, rank, gender or religious preference. How would that be?”

  “Um, boss.”

  “What?”

  “Sorry, boss, but you can’t do that.”

  Mordak sighed. “You’re being brave again, S’nnrg.” He pulled the object a little way out of his sleeve, just far enough so that the torchlight could play on its burnished steel. “In fact, not just brave but downright bloody heroic. Now, what did you just say?”

  “You can’t do it, boss.” The president screwed his eyes closed and braced himself. “Sorry.”

  “I see. Why not?”

  “You can’t promise equality regardless of gender, boss. We haven’t got any females.”

  “Ah.” Mordak sat back in his throne, frowning. He’d been quoting, of course, or rather paraphrasing, from the Elvish Declaration of Superiority. But goblins practised parthenogenetic reproduction, fishing their newly spawned offspring out of bubbling vats of beige goo with very long tongs and confining them in fortified rearing pens until their acne cleared up. Hence, no female goblins. It was a good system. It worked. “All right, then, regardless of age, size, rank and religious whatsit. No worries. Go away and see to it, there’s a good lad. And send someone out here with a mop and some potash.”

  The president tottered unsteadily away. Mordak sighed, took the egg whisk from his sleeve, turned the crank a few times and listened to the whirr of the blades. It was an artefact of human origin, he knew that, but unlike anything he’d seen before. The scouts had told him it came from one of the new human settlements far away on the south bank of the Great River, near the dreadful Tower of Snorfang. Apparently you used it for making meringues, though what it could do that a bundle of the desiccated neck sinews of your mortal enemy tied together with a bit of wire couldn’t, he was at a loss to guess. He put it carefully back in its cardboard box and stowed it under the throne.

  No women. Yes, it was a damn good system. It had served the goblin race well for millennia. It worked.

  Hmm.

  Ever since he’d started the New Evil project, basing his reforms on measures successfully adopted by other species and other cultures, he’d gradually come to the conclusion that goblins weren’t like most life forms. He wasn’t quite sure he could put his claw on what made them so different. Sure, there were the obvious, superficial things—the cannibalism, the mindless aggression, the loathing for sunlight, the three-inch fangs—but he knew it went deeper than that. Loyal goblin though he was, he couldn’t help thinking that his species was incomplete somehow, that Goblinkind was missing out on something it needed if it was ever to take its proper place among the mature liberal societies of the sunlit world. For a long time he’d worked on the assumption that it was intelligence; and it wasn’t a bad hypothesis at that, because goblins could be incredibly stupid at times, to the point where it made his head hurt wondering how they’d managed to survive so long. But his studies of dwarves, humans and Elves—especially Elves—had made him realise that crass stupidity wasn’t an exclusively goblin attribute. Yes, goblins could be pig-headed at times (and dog-headed, and goat-headed, and there was that colony out on the Freep River whose inhabitants had made him swear never to eat cheese late at night again) but generally speaking they had a modicum of basic common sense, and definitely knew which side their shin bones were larded on. So: if it wasn’t brains, what was it? Could it possibly be—? No, that was just plain silly. What possible difference could it make if you were hauled out of a goo vat rather than squeezed out of the guts of a fellow goblin? If anything, surely, it was a sign of superiority, because the other way of doing it, he was a bit hazy about the details but it sounded downright yuck. How could something so primitive and, well, let’s not mince words, barbaric possibly constitute an advantage?

  Quite. He shivered, and drank a skull of water to settle his stomach. Just then, the door behind the throne opened and his secretary came in, holding a big folder of papers.

>   “Oh,” she said, “you’re still here.”

  You can get used to Elves, eventually, if you try hard enough. “Tinituviel,” he said. “Tell me everything you know about non-parthenogenetic reproduction.”

  She raised one gossamer-thin eyebrow. “Certainly not.”

  “Fine. Tell me everything you know about females.”

  “Are you feeling all right?”

  “Broadly speaking, do you think they’re a good thing?”

  Elves, by the same token, can get used to goblins. It just takes longer, and why would they want to? “You’ve been thinking again, haven’t you?”

  He stuck his tongue out at her. “Of course I have. I’m an intellectual. Thinking is what I do.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “Thank you.”

  She smiled at him. “It’s just a pity you’re so bad at it. Still, that doesn’t alter the fact that you try.” She sat down beside him and pushed a dozen or so sheets of parchment at him. “Sign.”

  “All right. What am I signing?”

  “Bits of paper.”

  “Fair enough.” He took the pen and scrawled Mordak R where she’d marked the place in pencil. In the process, he lacerated the palm of his hand with his talons, but that couldn’t be helped. “Females,” he said. “You were about to fill me in.”

  “Why do you want to know about females?”

  “I was thinking,” Mordak replied. “Maybe it’s time we had some.”

  “What, dancing girls? Or lightly grilled on a bed of steamed spinach?”

  Mordak sighed. “As valued members of goblins society, taking their rightful place in the hierarchy of rights, duties and obligations.”

  “Oh, you mean cleaners. I can get some sent in if you want. Dwarves or humans?”

  “Goblin females.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” she said almost kindly. “There aren’t any. You know that.”

  “Maybe there should be.”

  He waited for her to reply. He counted to twenty under his breath. Then he took off the brooch that fastened the Black Cloak, yanked off the pin and dropped it on the floor. There was a faint tinkle.