Grunts

by Mary Gentle

  By the time the ringing concussion had died out of his ears the marine company was drawn up in serried ranks, filling the compound to capacity. Barashkukor snapped his squad to attention, saluting, as Zarkingu walked down the ranks.

  “Mmm—yes—hmm?” The sergeant (Magic-Disposal and Administration) lifted her snout out from a sheaf of papers. Her tilted eyes glittered in the sun, and a slight froth trickled down her small porcine jaws. One of her ears twitched arhythmically. “Corporal, your squad needs a colour designation. Call yourself Red Squad, or Blue Squad, or…”

  “Yes sir, ma’am!” Barashkukor slammed a salute. “Please, ma’am, permission to designate this squad Black Squad?”

  “No!” The female orc glared. She rattled the sheaf of papers under Barashkukor’s pointed nose. “We already have fifteen Black Squads, twelve Dark Squads, four Raven Squads, three Midnight Squads, one Sable Squad, one Ebony Squad, and,” she consulted a sheet of paper, “one Pink Squad. Hmm. Yes. Well…We’re all a little worried about Pink Squad…”

  Shaking her head, she moved on past Barashkukor. He watched out of the corners of his long eyes as she halted in front of Marukka’s all-female squad with their black unit-tattoos, whose helmets had “BADGURLZ” stencilled on their camouflage-covers.

  The sun beat down on Nin-Edin. The homely stench of ordure and decaying flesh rose up from the compound, comforting Barashkukor. He unobtrusively straightened his cleaned webbing and eased the strap of the M79 grenade-launcher where it cut into his horny shoulder.

  “Officer on deck!”

  Barashkukor came to attention and slapped his hand against the butt of the M79. The big female Agaku, Shazgurim, paced along the ranks of orcs, grinning nastily. She gave a lazy half-salute.

  “At ease, orcs. Sergeant Zarkingu will now read you this week’s promotion list. Zarkingu…”

  The smaller female orc marched up to the skull-standard pole, snapped an about-turn, and faced the orc company. Her thin, piercing voice echoed in the noon heat.

  “Now listen up! The entrails have been consulted, according to the usual procedure, and the results of the promotion-auspices are as follows. MFC Kusaritku is promoted to corporal. MFC Marukka is promoted to corporal. MFCs Azarluhi, Tukurash, and Ekurzida are made sergeants. Corporal Barashkukor is promoted to first lieutenant.”

  Barashkukor drew himself up proudly, ignoring the jealous mutters in the ranks. He grinned his fiercest grin.

  The small female orc, eyes gleaming, continued: “Sergeants Imhullu, Shazgurim, and myself are promoted to the rank of captain. CSM Ashnak is promoted to major, in command of this company. That is all.”

  A voice behind Barashkukor muttered, “Arse-licker!”

  “You!” Barashkukor snarled. “After parade. The whip: fifty strokes!”

  “Company, tenHUT!”

  Three hundred combat boots hit the packed earth in unison. Barashkukor, facing eyes-front, caught sight of Major Ashnak in his peripheral vision. The big orc walked slowly between the ranks, Sergeant Imhullu behind him, stopping to exchange a word or two here and there.

  Noon beat down on ranks of orc grunts, on web-belts hung with grenades, on rocket-launchers, assault rifles, antitank weapons, and machineguns. Orc-fangs glinted; squad insignia painted on hunched shoulders shone. Variously coloured combat fatigue trousers blazed back the light, cleaned and pressed after hard training. Boots shone.

  “A good turnout, sergeant.” Ashnak walked from the rank behind Barashkukor, Imhullu at his side. “Very good; I’m impressed. Stand the orcs at ease now.”

  “Squaaaads, standat—ease!”

  Again, three hundred boots hit the earth together. Barashkukor clasped his hands behind his back, wondering just where a first lieutenant’s insignia should be tattooed.

  Ashnak strode to where several ammunition cases had been assembled in a dais, and stepped up onto them. His black-and-white urban camouflage stood out against the blue sky.

  “Right, you orcs, listen up!”

  The Agaku had a machinegun and bandoleers slung across his back, and a Desert Eagle automatic pistol in the holster on his web-belt. His broken fangs had been capped with silver and polished, and a major’s insignia was painted on his muscular, sloping shoulders. Grenades hung from his belt. He wore a battered urban forage cap.

  “You’ve trained hard.” Ashnak surveyed the ranks. Barashkukor straightened his aching shoulders as the big orc’s gaze swept over him.

  “And now your training’s over.” The Agaku grinned. “I’m proud of you. You’re marines! You’re hot! You are fucking hot marines!”

  Shrieks and cheers split the air. Barashkukor shook his grenade-launcher in the air, taking two hands to do it. The big Agaku held up a hand for silence. He got it.

  “Your training’s completed, and you’re ready for your first big mission. Your officers will brief you fully in a moment, but I want to say this. We know now that the date for the Final Battle has been set.”

  The breath left Barashkukor’s chest as if he had been hit. Fear and adrenaline sparked through his veins, firing him with a fierce joy, and he growled in his throat.

  “The Horde of Darkness will march on the night of Samhain. But before that, and to ensure its success, you are first going to perform your mission.”

  The company stood quiet now. No noise in the noon of Nin-Edin but the vultures wheeling about the mountain fort and crying. Barashkukor swallowed with a suddenly dry mouth.

  “And succeed in it. I know you can do it—I’m proud of every one of you mean motherfuckers! You’re trained marines now.” Ashnak straightened, one taloned hand resting on his pistol. “Trained and armed. Captain Zarkingu will be instructing you personally later, but I will say this now. These guns are not sorcerous weapons. They are not magical. And therefore—therefore the magic of the Light has no defence against them.”

  6

  The interior of the Great Hall of Sarderis’s city keep shone white in the afternoon sun. Will Brandiman, comfortably replete, advanced towards the dais at the end of the Hall and bowed. Ned, walking beside him, looked wide-eyed and wondering at the company of elves, dwarves, and Men crowding around the dais, and at the female Man sitting on it in the high-backed chair.

  “Will and Ned Brandiman.” Will bowed again. “Halfling brothers, my Lady. Very much at your service.”

  He tugged his new silver-embroidered black doublet as if he were straightening it, taking advantage of the movement to check with nimble fingers the position of secret poisoned needles. His short-sword and throwing knives he had handed in at the gate-house, keeping the mail-shirt on pretence of personal danger.

  Ned bowed, cloddishly, still gazing up wide-eyed. Will trod on his brother’s foot as a warning not to overdo it, unwilling to use the Thieves’ Guild finger-talk where it might be recognised and read.

  “You two it was who found the family butchered? How is that so?”

  The female Man on the dais leaned forward in her chair. The light from the whitewashed walls shone from her plate-armour and the dazzling surcoat with the golden Sun embroidered on it. As her face came into the light, Will used every effort to keep from flinching.

  Her hair shone yellow as any female Man’s, cropped short over pointed grey-white ears. The greyish white of her skin continued across her face, becoming blotched with dark grey and black patches over her jaw and down her neck to where the gorget covered her skin. One misshapen tooth pushed up a corner of her wide, thin-lipped mouth. Thick hairs protruded from her flat nostrils, and her eyes—tilted so that they slanted up from the outer corners towards the bridge of her nose—glinted green.

  “Fear me not.” Her soft voice slurred a little, and a drop of saliva ran from under her lip where her tooth lifted it. She wiped her mouth with a gloved hand. “Fear not, halfling. I am called The Named. I wear another’s ugliness of soul upon my body—as he wears the beauty of my virtue, unearned, on his face. But that shall change, also, when we face each other in the final confrontatio
n. For now, believe my heart serves the Light, and speak your answer. You it was who discovered the bodies?”

  Will Brandiman spread his hands helplessly. “My Lady, the very sight was…horrific. These were good people of the town with whom we took lodging, and I greatly fear that was their downfall.”

  The Named said sharply, “How so?”

  “It must be that we were followed, Lady, on our way to you, and whoever sought our lives found those good people, and so…” Will swallowed. “We were about our own business that night, not returning until the morning, when we found their bodies.”

  A slender elf in green stepped forward from the crowd. “Some creature of darkness was responsible, Lady. The child’s body had been cooked and partially eaten. It is an infallible sign of the orc-filth. None but orcs could be capable of such wickedness.”

  “And the writing? Can orcs write?”

  The elf bowed her head. “For that, I know not.”

  Ned Brandiman, at Will’s elbow, said, “Our lodging was paid two weeks in advance at the shop. If the Dark has human spies in the city, I suppose they must have found that out and sent for…other creatures to attack us. Perhaps it was spies of the Dark who wrote—but I can’t read, Lady. Brother Will told me what filth they wrote.”

  “I did.” Will patted his brother’s arm. With his hand firmly on Ned’s arm he took the opportunity to finger:

  —I said act impressed, not half-witted.

  Will added, “Lady, there is much that you should know. I fear your brother seeks our life.”

  The stunningly ugly face shifted into something that might have been a sad smile. “Say on, little one.”

  “It is to our shame,” Will launched into his story, “that we were, in part and as it seems, employed by your brother the nameless…”

  He wielded ignorance and innocence in a complex web, his eyes on The Named’s misshapen face, leaving it to Ned to scan the assembly for armed Men, hostile dwarven-kind, and elvish mages.

  “…I grew to know something of these orcs. Orcs have no love of magic, Lady—unless it’s the sort that requires much torture and sacrifice and has short and easily pronounced incantations. But their magic-sniffer could tell an absence of magic truly. And so we fled for our lives, concluding that if they should escape, your brother’s orcish army now has weapons that are not magical but are infinitely greater than sword or bow. And these he will put at the disposal of the Dark Lord.”

  He paused.

  “And so we feared for you, Lady, and for all our sakes, and so came searching for you to tell this tale.”

  The green eyes, the only beauty in that face, met his. Her gloved hand beckoned. He walked to the foot of the dais, Ned at his heels, and craned his neck to look her in the face still.

  “You have done well to bring this tale to me. What reward would you have?”

  Will opened his mouth, but before he could get a word out, Ned said, “We’d paid our two weeks’ lodging at the house—is there any chance we could have that refunded?”

  The female Man’s head went back, and her wide, loose mouth opened in a bellow of laughter. Will instantly sized up the distance to the guarded exits. He put his heel down crushingly hard on Ned’s foot.

  “We want no reward,” he said emphatically.

  Her laughter stopped. “A strange quest you tell of, halfling. It seems by it, although you conceal it, that you are thieves. But even thieves may become the instruments of Light.”

  Ned muttered. “‘Adventurers.’”

  Will shifted his weight onto the balls of his feet, prepared to grab poison needles and flee under the feet of the crowd around the dais. “Thieves it may be—but thieves who hate the Dark as much as you do, Lady.”

  “Elinturanbar,” she called. She wiped her mouth again with her soft glove.

  A robed elf, taller by a head than any there, walked out of the crowd. Men and dwarves and elven-kind moved aside from the sway of his white robes embroidered with the gold Sun of the Mages. Will stared up into the lean face.

  “Elves!” Ned exclaimed. “I never thought I should see Elves, Will.”

  Will caught the missed breath in his brother’s ingenuous remark and the imperceptible shift to a combat-stance. Something cold twisted in his gut.

  The elf’s face showed the faint fine lines of age.

  Not half-elven, having none of the signs, nor yet one of the Long-lived come to the finish of his ages and the readiness to take ship to the Eternal Lands. Elinturanbar’s lean face, webbed with crow’s-feet at the eyes and mouth, shone with a fanatical light—that of those of the elven-kind who, out of the curiosity of the immortal, voluntarily embrace the pain and death that Men and other mortal creatures know.

  “Elinturanbar will question you,” The Named said. “He is my inquisitor. The deceptions of evil are many and legendary—forgive me that I choose to test you, as metal is tested in the forge, before I decide if you are tempered to become a sword of the Light.”

  Nimble, Will’s hand darted for the needles sewn into his doublet’s tabs. Fast as he moved, the aging elf inquisitor stooped faster and caught his arms, twisting them bonecrackingly hard up behind his back.

  Ned Brandiman took his hands out of the loose puffed-and-slashed sleeves of his doublet. Weighed down by the sheer bulk of metal, he nonetheless managed to brace both arms and hold out, muzzle wavering, the 1911 U.S. Army issue Colt .45 autoloading pistol.

  The midday sun burned down from a cloudless sky. The orc marines, beetle-browed eyes staring to the front, pounded down the track away from Nin-Edin under four- and five-ton loads of rifles, grenade-launchers, machineguns, machine-pistols, antitank weapons, and innumerable belts of ammunition.

  “Hut-two, hut-two!” Lieutenant Barashkukor stood with his hands on his hips, on the seat of his jeep. “Fucking elves could move that load faster. You want the major to see you?”

  Three hundred pairs of orc boots pounded down the road away from Nin-Edin in unison, the column raising plumes of dust. Barashkukor drew a deep breath and bellowed at the passing rank and file of orc grunts. “Are you marines? Move!”

  “Sir, yes sir!” Corporal Duranki shouted. His jaw set, he pounded on down the track. Like the others, the albino orc staggered under a backpack of weaponry three times his own height.

  “Then move your fucking asses!” Barashkukor bellowed happily. “At the double, orcs!”

  A metallic clash sounded.

  Harsh, rhythmic; the noise of bells, horns, trumpets, drums, and a saxophone split the air. Nine of the smaller orc marines, stepping smartly, bashed out an impromptu military march. They were singing, Barashkukor noted, something to the effect of “From the halls of Japh-kanduma to the shores of Zithan-dri…”

  Captain Zarkingu (Magic-Disposal, Administration, and Band Duties) marched past at the head of the band and the second column, skipping from side to side and tossing her skull-standard up in the air, macelike, in time to the music.

  “See you at the Tower, L.t.!” Zarkingu yelled.

  Barashkukor saluted. He sat down in the jeep’s back seat, tilting the GI pot back on his head and letting his long, hairless ears spring out from under it.

  “Lieutenant Barashkukor!”

  Barashkukor jumped up and came smartly to attention, snapping a crisp salute. “Sir, Major Ashnak, sir! We removed stores of weapons from the mountains, sir. Everything is being transported with the company, sir, including ammunition. The orcs are moving out as requested, sah!”

  “Thank you, Barashkukor.” Ashnak gave a casual salute. “Your unit’s got flying experience with Hueys, Lieutenant.”

  “Sir, yes sir!” Barashkukor leapt out of the jeep. “That is…sir, no sir! Incapacitated by illness, sir. The Bell HU-1 Iroquois was disabled according to your orders, sir!”

  Major Ashnak took the unlit roll of pipe-weed out of his tusked mouth and threw it down, grinding it under one polished combat boot. He tilted the urban camo forage cap back on his misshapen skull.


  “There were at least two Hueys in Dagurashibanipal’s hoard, Lieutenant. Break out another one. Find a pilot and a marine with co-piloting experience and report back to me.”

  Ashnak removed his forage cap and buckled on his GI-issue helmet, grinning toothily.

  “I have my orders from Dark HQ, Lieutenant. I’ve got no choice.”

  “I have no choice!”

  The Named swings up into the saddle of the white warhorse, bright armour clashing. Her destrier lays its ears flat back against its skull. She effortlessly controls it.

  “It is my fate to go to the Tower of Guthranc at the appointed time and use its power to summon the Army of Light to the Fields of Destruction. The time is now. The signal is mine alone to give!”

  The sun colours her ugly grey-white face with the gold of dawn. Her breath curls in the summer’s-ending chill. Somewhere in Sarderis there is the scent of the sea.

  “Follow my orders!” She wipes trailing saliva from the corner of her loose mouth. “This was prophecied for me when I was in my cradle, and I cannot avoid my destiny. I go now to Guthranc to sound the first war-summons to the Northern Kingdoms—I ride at dawn!”

  A gold Harvest moon rose over the distant mountains. The wind felt cold on Ashnak’s face. He rested his back up against a trampled earth-bank smelling of cow-dung and machine-oil.

  A scout orc slipped into the cover beside him. “Sir, nothing, sir.”

  The orc’s commando knife dripped. Ashnak peered between the hedge’s thorn bushes towards the village by the river. It showed even to his eyes as blackness against blackness. No lights, no cock-crows, no hammers in the smithy. He smelled the scent of Man-blood on the air.

  “Nothing left but the oldest and youngest of Men, and those were in hiding. All the smithies are empty, all the horseflesh gone.” She saluted. “No resistance, sir. We can take the columns through the river valley.”

  Ashnak’s hide twitched in the night’s chill.