by E. M. Hardy
Kurdan ignored Isiah’s quips, gesturing for Bartholomew to get on with his report.
The priest inhaled, collecting himself, and continued. “From those eight acres, we can expect to harvest about six to ten bushels per acre, depending on how good—or bad—the harvest turns out.” Bartholomew tapped his cheek in thought before continuing. “Although to be honest, the land here looks strangely fertile. It’s black and rich with decaying vegetation, plus the ground is pretty moist. If we get a few good rains in, I think we might harvest on the higher end of the estimates—perhaps eight to ten bushels. We’re also raising a few chickens and ducks. They’re taking well to the land, finding lots of weeds and bugs to feast on. We can count on them to provide a steady flow of eggs.”
Alyon and Bartholomew widened their eyes as Kurdan began writing down the numbers they listed off. He wrote it down using the letters and numbers that Isiah used, to the amazement of the two priests. He looked up and glared at them, breaking Bartholomew’s intense scrutiny and causing him to jump in surprise.
“Er, yes! Uh, we are also clearing more and more land each week, but the trees are old and hardy. Their trunks are hard enough to cut down with the axes you’ve given us, but it’s the roots that are really slowing down our progress. We just don’t have the beasts of burden we need to pull them out, so we end up having to meticulously dig them out.”
Bartholomew’s eyes kept sliding back to the words and numbers marked down on the flattened bark. Kurdan ignored his scrutiny as he turned to Shelur, who had already lost focus halfway through Bartholomew’s report. “Shelur,” he snapped, bringing her back to reality. “Your turn: how are our hunters and foragers faring?”
“Alright for now,” she answered. “Game and forage is still plentiful a day out of the village, though we’ve stripped the berries along that range. We still have roots and mushrooms here and there though, and we can always forage further if we want berries. I say we have about two, three years of hunting and foraging before we’ll have to move on.”
Kurdan frowned. He had gone with a hunter-gatherer party once, and he didn’t see that much game and forage.
“Wait,” he said, realizing something. “Did you add the humans to your estimates?”
“Estimates?” questioned Shelur, not getting what Kurdan was trying to say.
Kurdan closed his eyes in frustration and breathed in deep. “Ugg. No use big words. Use easy words so big, dumb orc get message. Ugg,” taunted Isiah, unable to restrain himself. Kurdan growled in deeper frustration, even though he wanted to bash Shelur’s head in.
“Will the game and forage last two to three years even if we feed the humans?”
Shelur frowned and grunted. “No. The weaklings should be able to feed themselves now that they are growing their crops.”
Kurdan growled once more, this time in warning. Shelur got the message, and quickly rethought her answer. “If we are to feed the humans, we should be able to feed everyone in the tribe for another year at least.”
Kurdan nodded, satisfied. He then turned his attention to the priests. “How soon can you harvest your crops?”
“Three more months; two if we get rains,” answered Alyon.
“Good, good,” Kurdan said as he nodded in approval.
“Keep hunting and foraging—enough for ourselves and for the humans,” Kurdan said as he turned to Shelur. “They will need more time to grow their food.”
Shelur huffed. “Why not have them gather their own food? These lazy weaklings have nothing more to do anyway.”
“Lazy!?” blurted Bartholomew, not caring if he interrupted the she-orc in the middle of her tirade. “Every one of us is out there right now, clearing more farmland to use. Our children are in the fields right now, pulling out weeds. Even our elders are not given a moment of rest, running these ‘research programs’ that your chieftain tasked them with. If we weren’t being held as slaves in this filthy, backwater village of yours, our own men and women would be foraging for their own food! And you DARE call us lazy!?”
Shelur growled as she faced Bartholomew, who in turn stood his ground in defiance. “OI!” Kurdan barked, surprising both Shelur and Bartholomew with the strangeness of his cry. “Back off, now. Shelur, do not kill that human. Bartholomew, do not defy your masters.” The chieftain shot a sharp glare at Shelur and barreled on before either of them could speak another word. “These humans may be soft and weak, but they have proven themselves to be anything but lazy. These humans will one day farm enough food for all of us, Shelur—orc and human alike. When that day comes, we will be able to focus every moment of every day strengthening ourselves. No more constant hunting, foraging, and relocating our village every few years. We will hold the land for ourselves, and we will grow stronger than any tribe our people has ever seen or heard of.”
Shelur’s eyes widened at Kurdan’s words, entranced by the promise they held. Alyon and Bartholomew, however, shared a worried glance. Orcs were strong and cruel, true, but they were chaotic and self-destructive. They were too busy carving one another apart to pose any real threat to the greater races. The tribes never worked with one another and would eventually end up at each other’s throats. This was why the civilized races viewed the orcs as nothing more than a collection of highly-destructive pests to keep contained in their forests.
What Kurdan had in mind, however, was far more dangerous than a horde of squabbling orcs turning their aggressions upon one another—and it frightened the two priests more than they cared to admit.
Chapter 17
Isiah glared at Blevins, daring him to attack. Blevins glared back, puffing his chest out. Isiah, however, kept staring at him. He even offered his chin out for an easy cheap shot.
Isiah wanted Blevins to throw the first punch. He wanted him to dump food all over him like he did Hasan. He wanted the bully to try something at school. He wanted Blevins and his goons to ambush him like he did before, to drag him off to the back of the campus and corner him where the teachers couldn’t see them.
And yet Blevins never did any of that. He just puffed a breath out of his mouth and backed off. Isiah scowled, disappointed, as he watched Blevins and his goons walk away. He huffed in disgust as he went his own way, back to the school library to do more research.
Sure, the douchebag went on and on about his patriotism and how he helped clean the country up of filth. Talk was all he did though, and in a relatively quiet manner to boot. It was almost as if he didn’t want other people to hear the crap he was spouting out of his mouth. Maybe his congressman father had warned him off such extreme and visible acts that would hurt his chances in the coming election. Maybe he was afraid of Isiah’s menacing countenance whenever they found themselves staring each other down. Maybe Blevins was suffering from a severe case of diarrhea and needed to go take a dump every half-hour or so.
In the end, Isiah never got Blevins to throw the first strike.
“Damn the coward,” complained Isiah to Kurdan. “He was happy enough to lay the beatdown on me a few weeks ago. Now he won’t even throw down. What gives?”
Kurdan laughed inside Isiah’s mind. “Oh, I don’t know; I’m just a dumb orc. What would I ever know about the intricate workings of human cowardice?”
Isiah groaned in his mind. “Oh, God. I preferred you better when you didn’t know a thing about sarcasm.”
Isiah tuned Kurdan’s chuckle out of his mind as he picked up a tablet attached to one of the desks in the library. He brought up the search engine and began skimming through various articles detailing how to turn woodland into farmland.
“You know,” thought Isiah as he went through an article detailing how to best get rid of large rocks and thick roots clogging up the soil, “the farmers would have a much easier time clearing out their new farms if you had your orcs help out. You’d have no problem tearing out those roots and hefting out those boulders, right?”
“Use that big, squishy human brain of yours to answer yo
ur own question,” Kurdan said.
Isiah thought about it for a moment and sighed, shaking his head. “Right. Your people have a massive hard-on for racial superiority. It would be too ‘demeaning’ to work alongside humans—never mind doing the heavy lifting for them.”
“For now,” replied Kurdan. “I will need more time—and even greater accolades—to force my orcs to change their minds.”
Isiah, turned back to his research, lost on the methodology of picking root trees out of the ground when two hands clamped down on his shoulder with great force—fingers digging into his skin.
Isiah acted on instinct, twisting away in a snarl as he whipped his elbow behind him. He managed to stop his fist elbow just in time to prevent smashing it into the side of a very surprised and pale-faced Bernabé.
The frightened teen jumped back, his hands held high up in the air as the few heads in the library turned up to check out the commotion. Eddy and Abigail sheepishly ducked their heads in shame at the librarian looking daggers at them, while Olivia pulled Bernabé away from Isiah. Hasan was behind them all, shaking his head in disappointment while whispering ‘I told you so’ to no one in particular.
“What the hell,” hissed Bernabé when he managed to gather his wits and sit beside Isiah. “First day back from suspension, and you’re already looking to give someone a black eye? You wanna get suspended that bad, cabrón?”
Eddison took the seat opposite Bernabé, his face narrowed in a tight expression of concern. “We heard you tried to pick a fight with Charlie and his gang earlier this morning. You all but dared them to put the beatdown on you, showing them up like that in front of the whole school. I mean, I’m glad they backed off, but what’s going on?”
“Yeah,” added Hasan as he lightly and cautiously laid his hand on Isiah’s shoulder. “The way you’re carrying things out, it’s like you’re the one who got macaroni dumped on his head.”
“Not to mention calling up ICE and telling them your dad is a Golden Sword collaborator or something,” added Abigail as she and her boyfriend Eddison sat down on the other end of the table. “But is this a macho thing with you boys? Like, couldn’t you think of a better reaction to getting surprised than starting another fistfight?” she quipped, a smirk on her face.
“Yeah,” muttered Isiah, raising his head to nod an apology toward his friend. “Sorry ‘bout that, Bear. Just really strung-up these days.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Bernabé said as he picked up a tablet and started scrolling through the titles of e-books the library had stocked up. “Remind me never to try and surprise you again—at least not until I’m at least a couple feet away from you,” he spoke the last part with a mischievous glint in his eye. That was when Isiah knew that Bear was already plotting something evil to get back at him for almost clobbering his face.
Only when Olivia leaned closer did Isiah notice her peeking over his shoulder and into the tablet he laid down on the table.
Isiah’s first instinct was to power down the screen, shut it off so she couldn’t see what he was looking up, but it was already too late. “Huh,” she said as she skimmed the list of entries that showed up on the search bar. “How to dig up tree roots… tree stump removal techniques… tools for cutting down really big trees… why? Do you have a problem with a tree in your yard or something?”
“Tree?” added Eddison before Isiah could answer. “Ever since when did your family get a tree?”
“No, it’s not for myself,” blurted out Isiah, groping for some plausible excuse for his strange studies. “It’s just that I saw this documentary once, talking about these giant sequoia redwoods that were as big as skyscrapers. Then I thought to myself, ‘how hard would it be to cut down one of those mothers by hand?’ After a little digging around, I found out the answer: really, really hard.”
Isiah thought it was a good excuse. Just a stupid kid being curious about a stupid thing. Most of his friends had already tuned out, picking up tablets and paper books of their own to skim. Olivia, however, studied him from the corner of her eye. A cold sweat ran down Isiah’s back as he realized the senator’s daughter knew a thing or two about people not being entirely truthful when they babbled out an excuse off the top of their head. He may have given a perfectly reasonable excuse, but he should have been more flippant, more dismissive, in the way he said it. A suspicious Olivia was not someone he wanted around—especially when she had it in her mind to stick her nose in someone else’s affairs.
At least she didn’t catch him while he was studying up on the impact of mutilation, the psychology of revenge, how to plant convincing evidence, and the way false-flag operations were conducted throughout history. Those would have been a lot harder to explain away.
Chapter 18
The Stonefist scouting party seethed in fury as they surveyed the carnage before them. Six of their hunter-gatherers, mutilated into piles of gristle and skinned flesh. It was clear to the Stonefists that their hunters had run into a raiding party and could not escape in time. Their tough hides had been skinned, no doubt to be cleaned dried into tough leather. The precious bones had been taken as well to be ground and chipped away into tools and weapons. It was standard procedure for raiding parties, as even the Stonefists did the same when they sent raiding parties of their own to gather orcbone and orc leather from their neighbors.
What rankled the Stonefists, however, was the fact that this was the fifth hunting party wiped out to the last orc without inflicting a single death on the enemy. If the hunters had been outnumbered, they should have run as fast as they could back to the Stonefist village. If the hunters had not been outnumbered, they should have at least inflicted at least some casualties of their own. It was a shameful display of weakness on their part, and they would not tolerate such shame once again.
And they knew exactly which tribe was responsible for inflicting such humiliation upon them.
The Goretusks had been aggressive in recent months, stepping up their raids on minor tribes with the confidence they had in their swelling numbers. They had, however, been awfully quiet these past few weeks. They had stopped their raids into minor tribes and pulled their warbands back into their territory. Such a buildup could only mean one thing: they were preparing to launch a major attack. The Goretusks were obviously targeting the Stonefists, testing their borders and whittling down their numbers by targeting their vulnerable hunting parties. It all made sense to the Stonefist chieftain once he thought about it.
“If those arrogant Goretusks think we will take their attacks lightly, then they underestimate our resolve!” shouted the Stonefist chieftain to the approval of hundreds of roaring orcs. “We are STONEFIST! We do not cut our enemies and bleed them like the cowardly Goretusks! We fall upon them in a falling rush of fury, and the Goretusk will know our full might by the time we are done with them! WE WILL CRUSH THEM!!!”
And with that, four hundred Stonefist orcs geared up to march in the largest single warband that the orcish forests had ever seen… at least, up to that point.
***
The Fleshrippers were opportunistic orcs, and they saw a lot of opportunity while their two biggest rivals fought each other. With the Stonefist and Goretusk busy bashing their skulls against one another, they were confident that they could raid their neighbors with impunity. Once they subjugated a tribe, the survivors would be given a choice: join the Fleshrippers or end up as sacrifices with their flesh carved up and strung all over the trees.
A warband of two hundred orcs marched out toward the minor tribe nearest their borders. They walked right to the huts of the Sunshatter tribe, heedless of whatever threat lay before them. The small tribe of about sixty orcs was no match for the screaming, raging mass of Fleshrippers that descended upon them. Thirty-one Sunshatterers died in the raid while ten refused to join and chose to become sacrifices. The remaining nineteen surrendered and joined up, swelling the Fleshripper ranks. Every single Sunshatter orcling was slaughtered for their bones, which woul
d be useful for knives, axeheads, and other utensils.
The Fleshrippers lost five of their own orcs: older orclings that charged headlong into the Sunshatterer ranks to prove their bravery. The others roared in approval at the orclings jumping into the enemy ranks with bellows of rage on their lips. Their fellow orclings roared the loudest, reveling in their new status as adults due to surviving their first blood battle.
This success would not last, however.
The Fleshrippers only found empty huts in the second village they were supposed to raid. Not a single Woodbreaker orc could be found, though their firepit still glowed with a few smoldering embers. They spent a few more days marching around the various villages, growing increasingly agitated by their fruitless expedition. The Rockfalls, Bloodfists, Bonegnashers—every minor tribe around Fleshripper territory seemed to vanish right before their warband arrived. Frustrated, the Fleshripper band set fire to every empty hut they found. If the cowards wanted to run away from them, then they would have nothing to return to.
Which is exactly what happened to the Fleshripper warband when they returned to their own village.
They stared, slackjawed, as ash piles stood where huts were supposed to be. Everyone from the youngest orcling to the most seasoned breeder lay dead on the ground. All were harvested for their tough hide and even tougher bones in the exact same manner that they inflicted upon the Sunshatterers. The Fleshrippers keened in grief and rage, searching desperately for survivors; they found none. The remaining Sunshatterers saw their chance to escape and took it—running for all they were worth while the stunned Fleshrippers were too busy grieving over their dead.
When the Fleshrippers found out, they didn’t rage as hard as they should have. No, they were too stung by the obliteration of their tribe and consumed by the need for vengeance. They would slaughter those responsible for breaking their tribe, no matter where they were. They found their first lead soon enough: a dead orc, slumped on a tree with his hands clutching his entrails. This orc did not die easy. No, he had fought to the bitter end—surrounded by the corpses of other Fleshrippers that had ganged up on him.