redneckgaijin

... and I really want to get back to Safeharbor sometime, but it seems like there's always something for WLP's ongoing comics that needs scripting or editing.

But this concept's been rattling around in my mind: what about a fantasy story that doesn't involve saving the world, finding the princess, etc... just a view of a war between the forces of civilization and a Dark Lord's orcish hordes from the point of view of a peasant farmer?

Morgen poured the tea carefully. In his normal life tea was beyond luxury; the price ensured that he only purchased enough each year to treat whichever family member might take ill. The brick of tea leaves in Dark Lord Llewellyn's headquarters supplies dwarfed the stock Hartheric the peddler took on his rounds. Placing the cup on the wooden sick-tray, he carried it over to the Dark Lord's chair with a cautious gait, rolling feet almost heel to toe to prevent the loss of even one precious drop.

The Dark Lord took the cup from the tray, rubbing his fingers on the plain brown clay for a moment, then glancing inside to look at the steaming liquid itself. "You did remember to use the leaves, yes?"

"Y-yes, Lord Llewellyn," Morgen bowed.

"It's just that this tea seems rather more transparent than I'm accustomed to."

"Lord? Is-is-isn't tea supposed to be transparent?"

"Only a little," Llewellyn said. He took a sip, frowned, and took another, much slower sip. "It is also decidedly weaker than I am accustomed to. How much leaf did you use?"

"My Lord, sir," Morgen bowed deeper, trying not to wring his hands before him, "w-with the high price of tea, I did not want to risk wasting your precious supply."

"I think next time you might risk just a little more leaf," Llewellyn replied. To Morgen's intense relief the dark lord said nothing to Thryk or Rugh. Dismemberment failed to happen. Instead Llewellyn continued to sip the tea, even sighing with what might be satisfaction when the cup was drained. "Another cup, please," he said, "and then pour yourself one as well. You look rather pale."

Just as the second cup approached the Dark Lord's lips, loud shouts and muffled thuds echoed through from outside the farmhouse. Frowning, he stood from his chair, set his cup down on the table before Morgen could think to take it away from him, and turned to face the door just as it slammed inwards, the latch snapping off its dowels almost instantly. Two of the largest orcs Morgen had seen yet pushed and shoved their way through the doorway, almost getting stuck midway through, each apparently trying to drag the other in against his will.

"Yes, what is it?" Llewellyn snapped.

Both orcs began shouting, each trying to drown the other out. In moments the words went from merely loud to roaring. Two green faces went greener by the moment.

"Silence," Llewellyn said, his smooth tenor voice cutting across the rougher voices (and rougher language) of the orcs.

The two orcs shut up instantly.

"And release one another," the dark lord added. "You look ridiculous like that."

The two orcs let go their grips; this required a series of awkward movements that reminded Morgen of a knot being untied. Standing as erect as orcs ever got, their heads barely missed the ceiling. Morgen idly wondered if there were such a thing as an orc-troll hybrid.

"Now you, Corporal," the Dark Lord said, nodding to the orc with a rough slash painted across one side of his breastplate. "I think you should have the first chance to explain why the two of you have disturbed me."

"Well, Boss," the orc corporal said, bending his head forward and pressing a knuckle to his bony eyebrow, "I ordered this piece of elf-offal to go scouting like you told us to, and he refused to go."

"He never tol' me it was you tol' us ter scout!" the other orc growled.

"Who says you needed to know?" the corporal shouted. "I told you to go! That's enough for bat-snot like you!"

"I ain't got ter take that from yer!" The scout turned to Llewellyn. "Guv, tell 'im he can't talk ter me like that!"

Llewellyn folded his arms. "Why did you refuse to go scouting?" he asked.

"'Cos it's stupid, innit? Beggin' yer pardon, Guv," the scout added, duplicating the brow-knuckle salute of the corporal. "Down close ter th' river they's no cover. That shiny Prince Jack an' his men can see us 'most a mile off! An' if they sees us, we cain't ambush 'em!"

Llewellyn sighed and shook his head. "I don't want to ambush them," he said. "I want them to come here. I want them to bring their whole army here- not just an idiot prince and his houseshold bodyguard."

The scout's eyes widened. With a yelp of fear the huge orc threw himself on the floor and kowtowed again and again. "I'm sorry, Guv!" he shouted. "I didn't know yer wanted 'em ta see us! I'll make sure they see plenty a'us! Jus' give us a chance, Guv!"

The corporal, on the other hand, furrowed his brow in thought. (On an orc this takes an extra effort, since a large portion of the forehead is essentially inflexible.) "Um, boss, that don't make sense," he said. "Us orcs have lost every stand-up fight we fought against the king's troops. Why would we want to fight the whole damn army?"

"Because this time, unlike all the times before, you aren't a raiding party of twenty or fifty orcs," Llewellyn said. "You're an army of twenty thousand orcs and near six thousand humans. You outnumber the king's trained army five to one. The king will call out the militia, which means he'll have a total army of maybe fifty thousand if he takes his time and arms every man, but they'll mostly be untrained farmers and citymen. No match for you."

"Oh, yeah," the corporal grinned. "That's right! Yeah! We can whip 'em, can't we?"

"That is the point of this entire enterprise, yes," Llewellyn said. "Rugh?"

"Yessir?" Rugh set down his book and stood from his seat on the floor. Llewellyn's enforcer was a shorter orc than the two brawlers, but they took a careful look at the scars crossing his arms and the large scar peeking out around the eyepatch and, almost in unison, took a careful step back as he approached.

"Take a dozen of my bodyguard and knock these two's heads together until they find the wit not to trouble me with their stupidity again," the dark lord said.

"You want I should take this one's stripe, too?" Rugh pointed to the corporal.

"Not yet," Llewellyn said. "But... Thryk, once these two wake up from their upcoming nap, get their names and their tribe's name. I want to know if either one comes to my attention again. If they're lucky..." Llewellyn's fingers drummed on his elbow as he drilled both orcs with his gaze. "... if they're lucky I'll never know of their existence again."

The two orcs didn't strugle as Rugh grabbed a breastplate strap in each hand and dragged them backwards towards the door. They were too busy thanking Llewellyn for his uncommon leniency and generosity. Rugh slung the corporal out first, then the scout, then following after. Behind him Thryk paused to slip the door latch back onto the stumps of its dowels before pulling the door shut behind him.

Morgen looked around the room. For the first time in days there was not an orc in the house. He was alone with the Dark Lord Llewellyn. Llewellyn, a skinny man not much more than half his age, with the physical build of a clerk.

Morgen's glance crossed Llewellyn's, and suddenly Morgen thought he preferred it with the orcs in. This, after all, was a human being who not only survived surrounded by orcs but got them to do his bidding almost without question.

"Do you want your bodyguards back, Goodman Morgen?" Llewellyn murmured, smirking.

"M-m-milord?" Morgen didn't notice his feet moving until he discovered his back to the farmhouse wall and the table between him and the dark lord.

"Never mind." The dark lord chuckled as he retrieved his cup of tea and took a sip. As he sank back into the chair, he added, "Do you ever wonder why Dark Lords like myself are invariably humans?"

"Er..." Morgen hadn't wondered any such thing. "Everyone knows Dark Lords are evil sorcerers with the power to hold the minds of lesser races in thrall."

One pale finger ran around the rim of the cup. "Learned that in the temple, didn't you?"

"Um... yes, milord."

"I rather thought so," Llewellyn said. "Actually the original Dark Lords were fallen angels, of a sort. Not human at all, nor elf or orc or anything else. But there hasn't been a fallen angel for millenia, or if there have been any they haven't bothered with us. And only a couple of the Dark Lords in the past two hundred years have been able to do any magic at all. I myself couldn't light a candle without a match."

The dark lord drained the cup of lukewarm tea, standing up again to set it on the table before Morgen could take it. "The reason's really much more simple. Rugh, Thryk, Arghem and Smyll are unusually intelligent and friendly as orcs go. Most of them are like our two dimwitted friends who just departed- more eager to fight between one another than against any common foe."

"Milord? I don't follow."

"In orc society rank is measured solely by who you can beat up. If one orc obeys another, it's because he knows that other orc is stronger or a better fighter. Male orcs hate that; they don't want to take orders from anyone, especially other orcs. Female orcs are worse; most of them have a fantasy of being the only female of the species, and they spend most of their lives trying to bring that about." Llewellyn smiled a bit wryly as he added, "Males, of course, always obey females. I could conquer the world with five female orc generals, if I could keep each from trying to murder the other four.

"But you can't build a civilization with that kind of perpetual conflict and disorganization. Orc chieftains either have to be the strongest or very obedient to the strongest. Tribe size is limited, because get too many orcs together and you have a bloody civil war, all the strong orcs trying to become leader over the dead bodies of their rivals.

"Orcs don't build anything themselves, except weapons and armor. Smiths have their own power- the other orcs need their skills in order to be strong- and working metal makes you pretty tough anyhow. An orc trying to build anything else would have to spend all his time defending himself from thieves or from would-be bosses trying to order him to build things. Weak orcs won't build only to have it taken away, and strong orcs won't build what they can steal for nothing."

Llewellyn's hand began tapping idly next to the cup. Morgen blinked, then fetched the tea kettle and poured the last of the tea into the cup. Nodding, Llewellyn picked up the cup and sipped.

"And that's where raiding comes in, and human slaves. Orc tribes cooperate just enough to pull off random raids on isolated farms and settlements. They take the humans back to the caves, teach them to grow the fungus the orcs call farming, to make clothing, to cook, even to write and translate between orc tribes. I don't know what it was like back when the orcs had actual fallen angels for their Dark Lords, but today they simply could not survive without their slaves. The slaves do everything except make weapons and fight.

"And the longer a slave lasts, and the better he does, the fewer orders he takes and the more he gives."

"Er..." Morgen couldn't resist the question.

"Doesn't make sense, does it?" Llewellyn asked. "Think of it this way. Most orcs don't trust one another. But what reason do they have to fear a human? Put one human and one orc in a sealed room, and sooner or later you're going to have one live orc and one dead human. They're just as fast, just as smart in most areas, and a lot stronger than humans. If they don't like what a slave says, they can kill them anytime they want.

"But orcs are not stupid. Even those two aren't any bigger idiots than most of your king's soldiers. They recognize that their slaves know better than they do how to do certain things. So when a slave proves himself skilled, they listen. A trusted slave will soon become a slavemaster for his owner; the orc who owns the slave knows that slave can get orcs to obey when he, the slaveowner, can't. And if the slave continues to prove himself skilled and intelligent, soon even his owner obeys. After all, the slave knows how to get things done... and, if one day the slave makes a mistake, the owner can always kill him.

"And then one day the slave owner looks around and realizes that if he kills the slave, a lot of other orcs will be very cross with him. And he thinks: well, why not? Obeying a human's not nearly as bad as obeying another orc. Besides, by this time the slave has proven beyond a doubt that he is VERY intelligent, VERY skilled, and VERY VERY GOOD at getting other people to obey him... else he'd have been killed long before.

"And that human, if he survives the inter-tribal fighting to unify the orc clans, that human becomes a Dark Lord."

Llewellyn returned to his chair and sipped the last dregs of the tea. "Yes, I do believe you could risk using more tea in the next pot," he said. "Please begin another one immediately."

"Yes, m'lord." Morgen picked up the kettle and walked to the door. Halfway there, he stopped. "May I ask a question, my Lord Llewellyn?"

"Please."

"How long have you been doing this?"

Llewellyn closed his eyes, his lips moving noiselessly for a moment. "Seventeen summers ago I was taken by orc raiders," he said. "I think I was nine, perhaps ten years old. I was training as apprentice to my village's priest. I could read and write in three languages, so I was made clerk and translator for my owner's clan."

"Oh." Morgen thought about this, then asked, "Have you ever made a mistake?"

"Well, since I'm still breathing," the dark lord said, "not yet."