Rise of the Horde

Chapter 841 - 840

Drakk arrived at Yohan’s northern gate on a morning when the forge district’s smoke rose straight into a windless sky and the training grounds’ cadence drills sounded like a heartbeat through the city’s wall, and what struck him first was not the size of the wall, though the wall was larger than anything the highlands had built in his lifetime, and not the smell of the city, though the smell was the smell of a hundred thousand small fires and ten thousand cooking pots and the iron-and-oil smell of the forge district that undercut everything else the way iron undercut everything else it was mixed with.

What struck him was the sound of children.

He had been told there would be children. Vor’gath had described the children specifically, as had Kael, who had used the children’s presence in the city’s streets as evidence in his argument to the clans that Yohan was a civilization rather than a military installation. A military installation did not have children. Children were evidence of permanence because children were the specific investment that people made in a future they believed was coming.

Drakk had processed the information. Information processed in a hall while sitting at a council table was information at a certain distance. The sound of children playing on the other side of a stone wall was information at no distance at all.

"Seven of us," his lieutenant, Harrak, said from behind him. Harrak’s voice was the voice of the lieutenant who had served under Brokk for twelve years before the current arrangement, the voice of someone who had been managing his chieftain’s tendency toward impulse for the past six weeks. "Seven highland warriors at the gate of an orcish city. With no appointment. With no official status. The Kael negotiated the withdrawal’s terms. We did not. We are not the negotiators."

"We are not here to negotiate," Drakk said.

"Then what are we here for?"

Drakk looked at the gate. The gate was heavy timber banded with iron, the construction practical and deliberate, the gate of people who understood what a gate was for and had built accordingly. The Snarling Wolf banner flew above the wall’s north-facing battlement. The wolf’s head was visible from here, its direction the direction that the banner’s design always pointed: forward.

"To see," Drakk said. "Vor’gath told us what is here. I want to see it."

* * * * *

The gate’s guard had not seen highland warriors at the gate before, which was true because highland warriors had not come to the gate before. The guard’s response was the response that the uncertainty of an unprecedented situation produced in a professional soldier: measured, correct in form, neither hostile nor welcoming, the response that bought time for the question to travel up the chain to the person whose authority the question’s resolution required.

The question traveled to Sakh’arran, who brought it to Khao’khen.

"Seven warriors," Sakh’arran said. "Led by a young chieftain. No weapons beyond personal arms. No standard. No herald. No advance communication."

"Which chieftain?"

"The guard’s description matches Drakk. Brokk’s son. The warband passed to him after the capital."

Khao’khen was quiet for a moment. The specific silence that preceded a decision whose content was already clear but whose implications required a moment’s acknowledgment before the decision was spoken.

"Open the gate. Assign Tul’rok as escort. No ceremony. No formation. Tul’rok meets them as a guide meets travelers, not as an honor guard meets a delegation. Take them where they want to go."

"And if they want to go somewhere they should not?"

"There is nowhere in this city they should not go."

* * * * *

Tul’rok was the senior Verakh who had delivered diplomatic messages to drunken gate guards during the capital’s assault, a skill set that had prepared him more thoroughly than any formal training for the specific task of escorting seven highland warriors through a city they had never seen and presenting the city’s features with the confidence that Tul’rok’s professional demeanor always projected whether or not the situation warranted it.

"The forge district," Tul’rok said, when Drakk indicated he wanted to understand what produced the smoke. The escort moved through the forge district’s streets with the ease of a person for whom these streets were the streets of home, which they were. Around them, the smiths worked at their stations with the focused inattention of craftsmen deeply engaged with their materials, the ring of hammer on iron and the hiss of quench-water providing the percussion that the district’s productive rhythm ran on.

Drakk stopped at the station where a smith was fitting the barrel of what was clearly a Roarer, the weapon that had dominated every account of the campaign’s engagements that had made its way back to the highlands. The smith, a broad-shouldered orc whose forearms bore the burn-scar patterns of years of forge work, was checking the barrel’s tolerances with a measuring instrument that Drakk did not recognize but whose function was evident in the way the smith used it.

"May I look at it?" Drakk asked. His Orcish was the Orcish that the highland clans who shared the mountain roads with orcish trade parties had absorbed over decades: functional, accented, correct in its essentials.

The smith looked at Tul’rok. Tul’rok made the gesture that indicated the guest’s request was approved. The smith handed the unfinished barrel to Drakk with the unsentimental directness of a craftsman passing a tool rather than a weapon.

Drakk turned the barrel in his hands. The iron was good. Very good. The smoothness of the bore was the smoothness of precision work, the kind of smoothness that required either exceptional tools or exceptional skill or, in this case clearly, both.

"Your smith made this?" Drakk asked.

"Our smith designed it," Tul’rok said. "Our smith and his apprentices build it."

"You don’t buy from the dwarves."

"We don’t buy from anyone," the smith said, without looking up from the next barrel’s preparation. The sentence was not boastful. It was the simple factual statement of a craftsman describing his situation.

Drakk handed the barrel back and said nothing further. But Harrak saw his chieftain’s hands close and open at his sides once, the gesture that meant the mind was processing something at a depth that the hands felt before the mouth articulated.

* * * * *

The learning hall was on the way between the forge district and the residential quarter, and Tul’rok brought them through it at the time of the afternoon session, when Skarra’s teaching group was in progress.

Drakk stood in the hall’s doorway and watched.

Thirty children at long tables. Some writing. Some reading. Some doing both in the alternating pattern that the simultaneous instruction of multiple levels produced when the single instructor, the small female child at the front, who was no older than eight, was managing the room by the method of keeping everyone engaged in the work rather than waiting for the instructor’s direct attention.

"She teaches?" Harrak said, quietly, to Tul’rok. Disbelief was present in the tone, but it was the disbelief of someone who was looking at a thing that was real and whose disbelief was therefore losing the argument with the evidence.

"She was the first student," Tul’rok said. "She is the most advanced. She teaches the less advanced. The less advanced, when they advance, teach those who come after them. The chain extends."

"What do they learn?"

"To read. To calculate. To understand the city’s systems, water, food, governance. They learn the city’s history. They learn the chieftain’s history. They learn the histories of other peoples and other civilizations that the chieftain has studied, because the chieftain believes that a people who do not know the history of those who built before them are the people most likely to repeat the mistakes that the building produced."

Harrak processed this with the expression of someone trying to fit a new category of thing into a schema that had not previously included the category.

"The chieftain teaches them history," Harrak said.

"The chieftain provided the histories. Others teach them."

Drakk watched the room for a long time. He watched the child instructor and the children being instructed and the room’s quality of focused quiet, the specific quiet that groups of people produced when the people in the group were engaged with the same purpose. It was the same quiet the warriors produced in training. The same quality of attention, directed at a different task. He had not previously understood that the quality of attention could be the same thing regardless of what it was applied to.

* * * * *

The remembrance wall was at the city’s eastern edge, between the administrative district and the residential quarter’s first street, in the position that the wall’s proximity to both districts communicated: not hidden, not displayed. Present. Part of the city’s daily passage rather than a destination visited intentionally.

Tharuk was there when they arrived, adding mortar to the base of a new stone section that the wall’s expansion required. The stonemason had been expanding the wall since the campaign’s conclusion, not because there were new names to add, the dead were the dead and their number was fixed, but because the wall’s original construction had not anticipated the city’s growth and the growing population’s need to pass the wall and see it and not be turned away by a crowd.

The wall was granite. The names were carved in the deep-relief technique that Tharuk had developed over the months of the wall’s construction, the letters cut deep enough that light falling across the face produced shadow in the letterforms, making the names legible from a distance and at dusk and in the specific low-light conditions that the wall’s eastern position produced in the late afternoon.

Three hundred and twenty names. In columns that descended from the wall’s top to its base in the order that the dead had fallen, beginning with the campaign’s first engagement and ending with the last. The columns did not distinguish between warbands. The columns did not distinguish between rank. A Rakshas and a supply auxiliary stood in the same column if their deaths had been proximate in time, because the wall’s order was the order of when rather than who, and the when was the only order that the dead themselves had determined.

Drakk walked along the wall and read names.

His Orcish was good enough to sound the names, which was all that reading names required. He moved slowly, reading each column’s names with the attention that names required when the attention was the attention of a person who was looking for specific names in a column he did not know the position of.

He found the name he was looking for in the seventeenth column.

Ulgan. Ulgan had been the Verakh who died in the Tekarr Mountains’ interior during the pursuit of the group that had found the relic. Galum’nor had named the dead at the command fire: Ulgan. Ralkh. Meesha. Dren. Four Verakhs who had died fighting the Owlbear that the highland Hoot-Hoot Tribe’s totem-spirit had become.

Four Verakh names carved in the orcish wall.

And below Ulgan’s column, in the forty-first column, a name that was not an orcish name. The highland script’s characters, recognizable to anyone who had grown up reading highland clan markers, forming a name that Drakk read twice to confirm.

Borrak. A highland warrior whose name and clan marker had been identified from the effects that the orcish healers had catalogued when the barbarian wounded had been treated in Yohan’s recovery chambers. Borrak had died of wounds two days after the capital’s fighting concluded, in the recovery chamber where the orcish healers had treated him with the full application of the healing system’s resources.

The orcish city had carved the name of a highland warrior on its wall of the dead.

Drakk stood at the wall for a long time. Harrak stood beside him and did not speak, which was the right response, the response that the specific situation required and that Harrak produced because he was, whatever else he was, a person who understood when to provide presence rather than speech.

"Vor’gath told us," Drakk said eventually.

"He said they carved a barbarian name on their wall," Harrak said.

"He said it. I didn’t understand it until now." Drakk touched the letters of Borrak’s name. Not reverently. The way a person touched something real to confirm the reality. "He died here. In their city. Being healed by their healers. They added him to the list of people whose deaths this city acknowledges as the deaths of people who had names."

Harrak said nothing.

"We killed their warriors," Drakk said. "They put our dead on their wall." He paused. "That is not what enemies do."

* * * * *

Khao’khen met Drakk at the administrative hall in the evening, in the arrangement that the meeting’s nature required: no war council, no diplomatic formation, two chairs at the map table with the map’s markers in the positions that the current situation’s assessment reflected.

Drakk sat in the chair with the posture of a person who was not performing the relaxation he did not feel and was not performing the confidence he was uncertain about, the posture of someone who had decided that honesty about his position was more useful than the theater of certainty.

"I came without authority," Drakk said. "I am a chieftain of a single warband. I cannot speak for the highland clans. I cannot offer terms or accept terms. I came to see what Vor’gath described."

"I know," Khao’khen said. "The Verakhs identified your group two days ago. The identification included the absence of a herald and the absence of a diplomatic standard."

"And you let us in anyway."

"You came to see. The city does not hide from observers. If the city cannot be seen by those who want to see it, the city cannot be understood by those who need to understand it. Your people need to understand what is here before they can decide what to do about it."

"What to do about it," Drakk repeated.

"The mutual non-aggression is in place," Khao’khen said. "The clans and the Horde do not threaten each other. The arrangement is sustainable. But sustainable is not the same as best. The best arrangement is the arrangement that Vor’gath described before the fighting began: that the highlands and the Horde address the common interests they share without the fighting that the common interests’ resolution does not require."

"You are offering the same terms."

"I am describing the same situation. The terms follow from the situation. The situation has not changed."

Drakk looked at the map. The highlands were at the map’s north. Yohan was at the south. The frontier line marked the zone between the orcish territories and the Threian kingdom. The Tekarr Mountains marked the eastern passage between the highland plateau and the southern plains.

"What do you want from us?" Drakk asked. The question was direct in the way that highland warriors asked direct questions: not as aggression, but as the expectation that the person across from you would respect the question enough to answer it honestly.

"Not tribute," Khao’khen said. "Not territory. Not military alliance that requires the clans to fight in orcish wars. I want the highlands to know that this city exists and that what it represents is the possibility that the orcish people have been building toward. I want the highlands to know because the highlands are the people who share the Narrow Pass and the mountain roads and the seasonal routes that connect the southern plains to the north. Those connections will be more valuable when they are connections between peoples who choose to connect rather than peoples who tolerate each other because the alternative is expensive."

"You want trade," Drakk said.

"Eventually. First I want understanding. Trade is what understanding produces when understanding has been established long enough to develop the trust that trade requires."

Drakk was quiet for a moment. "Vor’gath told the council what he saw. Some of them listened. Some of them are waiting to see what happens next."

"What happens next is what we make happen," Khao’khen said. "I can build the city. I cannot determine whether the highlands decide to engage with what the city represents. That is the highlands’ decision. I can only ensure that the city continues to be the city that is worth engaging with."

Drakk stood. He stood as a man stands when a visit has done what he came for, not yet the full answer, but the full experience from which the answer would eventually be drawn.

"The wall," Drakk said. "Borrak’s name."

"He died here," Khao’khen said. "People who die in this city are on that wall. That is the city’s practice. The practice does not distinguish."

Drakk looked at the chieftain for a long moment with the evaluating look of a young warrior who has been trying to determine what category to place someone in and has arrived at the conclusion that the category does not exist yet and will need to be created.

"The highlands will watch," Drakk said. "And when the watching has produced enough to work with, someone with authority will come."

"The watching is the beginning," Khao’khen said. "The beginning is enough for now."