None of them can see me as I crouch by the window. I
know this, because they haven't come out to kill me.
I hate them - I hate you, probably - but they - and
you - hate us, too. If I felt like laughing, I would
- it's right for us to hate each other. You hate us
because we remind you how far you can fall, and we
hate you because you treat your state as a right,
rather than the luckiest of circumstances. Go back
far enough, find the right event to change, switch the
target of a particular raid ... and it'd be me in
there swilling ale telling stories about their
particular celestial slavemaster, and it'd be you
crouching in the dark swallowing your bile.
I can recite the details of the conflict, of course:
you can even say it's bred into my bones. Not the
least of the so-called 'Unbroken' Races' crimes is
that they get to interpret everything in their own
terms: my people do not even have our own name. 'Orc'
is a Human word: it originally meant 'demon' - and
that tells you everything that you need to know about
purebred Humans. "It's ugly, short and smelly: it
must be a creature of evil."
Well, we are - but, when it came to it, what choice
did we have?
The oldest of us still whisper scraps of legends and
languages, passed down through generations from our
first ancestors. Snatches of songs, bits of stories,
a name or two - but no prayers. Those were discarded
with the end of hope. That hope must have died hard:
for, after all, were they not valuable? They were
their God's creations, with intrinsic worth and
self-dignity. The forces of Good would not rest until
such worthy souls were rescued, surely?
But rescue never came - and the stones of our
homes/prisons almost reek of the stink of that
betrayal. Of course, those feelings of shocked
outrage faded, too: sucked down into the dark to die
unlamented. In the end, there was nothing but the
darkness and the collars and the breeding places (no,
not pits. Pits are too hard to hose down afterwards).
Every one of my people is descended from captives who
were written off by their fellows ... and by those
sanctimonious hypocrites who claim to be servants of
their God. Either they lie, or else their God is a
tyrant and slavemaster worse than any here on Earth.
We have all of this explained to us quite thoroughly,
you see. Not all of us, of course: just the ones
deemed smart or strong enough to serve. Gaining that
privileged status is all we dare dream of - because it
means that we can be half-free. Free to kick where
once we were kicked, free to snatch food from others
instead of having it snatched from us, free to amuse
ourselves, instead of being the amusement of others.
All we have to give up in exchange is any illusion
that we were not damned from birth. A small price to
pay for the privilege of almost standing tall for a
few short decades before we are inevitably dragged
into Hell.
The males, at least: the price paid by our females is
so very, very different. If the look in their altered
eyes is anything like the look in the Princess of
Freedom, then I am glad that I was not born a woman.
So we serve Hell, and are no doubt served up in our
turn - but at least we are not lied to, like our
ancestors were lied to by those cold scions of their
God. Demons make themselves clear: submit, or be
destroyed. If Hell does not strike the blow, then our
estranged cousins will. We horribly fascinate them,
you see: they can see traces of themselves in our
features, and the horror that this inevitably produces
will soon be transmuted into sick rage. Rage at us
for being so weak as to have ancestors that submitted to overwhelming force: would that they turned
that rage towards their own forebears for letting it
happen.
Every Orc knows this - and they also know that, for
all of Heaven's prating about 'mercy' and 'love' and
'peace', there is no room at that table, no room in
that inn, no place in the planned scheme of things for
us. If Heaven were to win, the best that we could
hope for - the very best - is the utter destruction of
our race. We have so very little, but we will not let
even that be taken from us simply because we are
deemed an abomination by others. So we serve Hell,
for they at least will let us continue as we are. Why
should they not? They were the ones who put us there.
With the death of hope comes at least a numbing of
pain.
I look at the group again, through the window. Smug,
self-satisfied, blithely unaware of their own chains,
they have deliberately blinded themselves to the true
nature of the universe, and actually imagine
themselves to be free. I despise them with all my
heart.
And I also wish with all my heart that Hell had raided
some other damned village all those years ago, so that
some cleaner version of me would be permitted to go in
and partake in their illusion...
Back to the INC Mainpage.
Back to the Fiction page.
Send mail to the Curator