The Thousand Stories by herenortherenearnorfar

---

Hagru and the Benefits of Cooperation

roughly 1703 SA? This one is weird because it's very orc centric but orc views on humanity, if you know what I mean. (I do have a lot of orc creation myths in mind now, including thematic star fixations, but they are not for this day.)

Warning for general orc behavior and some soldier songs (cut off).

---

They taught you how to slit the throats of your enemies, how to send their snivelling brats wailing into the dark, how to beat the war drums and struggle up the rungs of the bloodstained hierarchical ladder. 

They didn’t teach a single thing about dinner parties. No one expected an orc to attend one of those. Humans and orcs didn’t mix like that, on account of etiquette differences.

No one had told the damned girl that. As soon as Hagru had come back to the home plateau, back from two years helping bring the nomadic peoples of the empty lands to heel, she’d received the invitation. She’d just about put the little miss out of her mind and now this?

She had to go, though, didn’t she? Even if the human was as soft and spoilt as the curdles in milk, she was still part of the big man’s circle of advisors. The high tower didn’t look kindly on low soldiers who contradicted its special guests.

It was all politics, made and run by the sort who were better used as spider food. If Hagru wasn’t worried about being sent to see She of the Mountains herself, she’d go sozzled on the worst sort of mash drink. Instead she polished up the bones set in her leather armor, girded her hips with a nonthreatening knife, and made to look presentable. 

Maybe this was just another bit of curiosity. The humans could get awful interested in an orc as obviously female as she was. Most of her kin didn’t grow enough hair to be recognized as women by those close-minded louts, but the toll the flesh-molder had taken from Hagru’s pitted and sunken face had apparently been returned on her scalp. So they pried. Mind, she was pretty sure the girl would have had cause to meet plenty of orcs in the two intervening years, and surely some of them had a few strands of the old fur on top. She’d have had plenty of other targets to take an interest in, especially now that the body of the army was back from the big war.

When she arrived a shaking human led Hagru up the steps into a bit of the tower that stunk of perfume and feathers. There was hardly any orc smell here, only the rancid sweat of men. 

The girl— hard to call her anything but a woman now, Hagru noted, for though she hadn’t grown much in stature in the two years she’d certainly gained a lot of boldness— opened her door onto a cramped little apartment of a few rooms, which she clearly shared with the same servants who had accompanied her on the journey up from her home. They were still the same fearful sort, and the woman was still bright-eyed and watchful. Hah! Watchful and entitled, a perfect fit for a world of lords and knowing eyes. 

“It’s just the two of us dining,” she said, ushering Hagru to a tiny table with two tureens already piled with food. Hagru was delighted to note that the meat in her bowl was fresh and pink. It lacked the seasoning of rot it could have had, instead there were decorative plant bits everywhere, but it oozed as Hagru poked at it dark red juice obscuring whatever noncy design was in the ceramic bowl. Fresh and bloody. 

She grunted appreciatively, before sitting in the flimsy wooden chair provided and digging in. What better way was there to show enjoyment than to eat what was provided? When she looked up from the (too tender, annoyingly wine soaked) meal the servants were gone and the woman was watching her carefully. 

“Got something to say?” Hagru challenged, before belatedly remembering that she was supposed to be minding her manners. There was a reason she’d never advanced past mid-command; she simply didn’t have the temper to handle humans with the care they required. There were some corners of the army where that was acceptable, but most of the generals had to either take orders from or give orders to the odd feeble human— and they didn’t like honesty. 

Hagru, on the other hand, loved being honest. 

Maybe that's why she'd been kept out of the action during the last big throw down. All the other orcs were allowed to go kill elves but not Hagru, she doesn't know when to shut up. Best let her and hers tidy up the kingdom while everyone else is off having fun. 

The woman, to her credit, didn’t waver, even as Hagru's temper turned. Were she just a few years younger she would have, but it seemed she’d gotten over her fear of bogeymen. 

“I wanted to thank you, for conveying me here safely. The trip was long and you were… kind.”

Hagru spat a piece of fat, one that really could have been chewed down to nothing, onto the table. She wanted this conversation over. “Take that back!” 

The woman looked away. “I will not. I might not have realized it at the time, but you were being nice. Of course once I knew enough about your people to know that’s what it was, you were gone, so I had to wait.”

“And?” There were red eyes up and down the front of her pale dress, Hagru noted for the first time. She only had fuzzy memories of the journey north from Ilat with the girl and her train— mostly of riding at night through the hinterlands of Far Harad and cursing the sun that bore down through even thick daytime tents— but it didn’t seem like the sort of thing she’d have worn back then. “Think this is enough for all the trouble I went through, toting your sorry frame through the summer mountains? Think it’s a good little apology for all the times I found you crying alone?”

“No! It’s just, it’s better than nothing.” Her lips pursed. “You know, I’ve heard the stories about orcs, about why I ought to be sorry for them—” Hagru had heard those stories too. Because their hearts were faint and their minds were moldable, the humans she had met all seemed to be under the impression orcs had once been the same as them. Some even cast it as a terrible tragedy; that poor mortal souls had been so twisted by torment.

Well, Hagru couldn’t deny that orcs bled like humans, and died like them too if you stuck them hard enough. And a human put though enough torture could even begin to look like an orc with time. If you locked them away from sunlight and chopped off bits of them at random, and maybe let them get eaten by badgers for a few hours, the resemblance could really be uncanny. 

Still, she wasn’t convinced. Her people had their own secret histories. They were more bitter than any sob story the humans believed. 

“So if we’re the same underneath it all, couldn’t we have a civil conversation?” the little princess said, voice trembling like an animal right before you slit its throat. 

Hagru folded her hands, aware of her dense, sharp claws over the smooth finish of the table. “Shouldn’t you be trying this with some of your own lot? There’s a lot of humans here, you can have little dinner parties with them, can’t you?”

The frustration that passed over her host’s face then was hard to parse. “They don’t like parties.”

“Well, neither do I, hows about that.”

Cytise threw up her hands then, a sudden, sharp gesture more befitting a wild woman than the put together lady in front of Hagru. “Fine then! You can go. I just—” Hagru stayed, wary of the whims of humans and the power of damned politics, “You were kind, back then. Sometimes you would let me sit around your fire while you sang your songs. It was nice, I think.”

So Hagru had. She’d been warned by the men who’d handed her over that this one might be a runner, and though there were few places in the sunlit hells to run to, the all orc escort (they’d been in the area after dealing with a small uprising in Ilat— for nothing afeared the petal-skinned southerns like orcs did) did make the prospect of an attempted escape distasteful. Rather than risk it she’d kept her charge close during the daylight hours, inside the tent where the smoke and stench made her vomit the first few days. 

After the adjustment period, she’d made decent enough company. That was true. 

Maybe even humans got tired of hearing other humans patter on. 

“You had a good singing voice, for one of your lot,” Hagru recalled, relaxing a little. She wasn’t sure how small talk went but she was willing to give it a try. 

A laugh escaped from the lady. “Well that’s not true at all. I used to have friends who were musicians, back home, and they’d beg me not to sing.”

Casting her mind back so far, dredging up old memories, it was hard. Hagru had never been the sort for keeping a record of her days. You fought, you drank, you killed, you forgot. What was friend one day might be foe the next, and so you grew used to waking up each new morning ready to live again. 

Nevertheless, she was pretty sure the girl had a decent voice, a bit pitchy but deliciously discordant— the sort that pierced the ears of enemies and shattered their thinking bones. 

“Nah, nah. You did a hell of a job on the chorus, remember?”

Knocking her chair back, Hagru stood and started the verse of an old song, surely one they’d sang on the way back up the spiny road, in the old cant, of course. 

“Lo! And we walk again and we curse the one

Who made us walk at all

And we walk again and we curse the one

Who gave us such big—” She remembered where she was at the last moment. Some rhymes were not appropriate for such high and lofty company, even if she did hum along after the initial flinch away.

“Ah, well. You know the rest,” Hagru awkwardly scratched the back of her head. 

“Not really.” 

Servants were poking their heads in around a door the doddering old things. Hagru let them see a bit of yellow tooth and they ducked away, before their lady even noticed. She did seem preoccupied. Cytise was drifting around the table towards her, dark eyes gleaming with interest again. Drat. “I don’t know the dialect. It’s not quite the One Speech…”

“Orc lingo,” Hagru hastily informed her, taking a step back. The room was so small and cramped, and everywhere she turned there seemed to be something precious. Surely no one could blame her if something broke? The daft girl had invited her here. 

(But orcs were easy to replace, and Hagru had no illusions about her value as a commander.)

Fortune was on Hagru’s side, for the woman stopped a safe distance away. “I never knew the lyrics, you know? I just sang along. What’s it about?”

“Being burdened with greatness,” Hagru said earnestly. “Not the most serious of our songs. Bit of a joke one.”

“You have serious songs?” There it was again, that implacable curiosity, undeterred by a broken chair of a bowl of swirling blood and gristle.

Unsettled as Hagru was, she couldn’t help but play along. “Why wouldn’t we?”

In return she received a helpless gesture. “I don’t know. I really don’t know much about you. Even though there are orcs everywhere here there always a— a distance.”

It’s there for a reason, Hagru privately reflected. Humans could not handle the brutality of a fight for power, however much they considered themselves the cruelest and most power hungry. They had stomachs too weak and bodies too frail for most of an orcs favorite past times. One might give the other orders, or the other way around, and they worked well provided they didn’t have to interact too much, but even the savviest of generals faltered when asked to deal with humans full time. 

Instead they relegated each other to a sort of mutual pity and usefulness.

Sweet as the princess Cytise’s interest was, it was very, very doomed.

Hagru felt a stab of empathy and decided that once more, she could try to be nice. “Sit back down, woman,” she demanded, and was pleasantly surprised when the command was obeyed. 

“Now, I reckon you’ve got your head a bit mixed up. I don’t know how to unmix it, as unfamiliar with the contents of human heads as I am,” She actually knew very well what was inside those bird’s egg skulls, it’s just that she knew it as a lot of pink meat rather than the thoughts she also suspected resided. “But I can at least try to give you an old orc lesson. It doesn’t end well when the two kinds come together. It’s been tried before and it failed.”

She could see the questions rising on the girl’s lips and she shushed them with a quick slicing motion. “I’ll tell you the story, just let me get on with it!”

It was properly a song. Lots of the old ones were songs, sung because they had to be. In Hagru’s two hundred years several of the oldest had been forgotten, repurposed as shorter fireside tales or rough jokes. The habit of singing seemed to be dying back out among the younger orcs. Many of the ones who dwelt closest to the tower and the mountain scorned singing entirely. 

So Hagru would repurpose this particular big of doggerel, because Cytise didn’t understand the morphed speech used between orcs and since she did shudder a little at singing, poor frail eared thing. 

Translating and adapting took a lot of concentration, and it was a good few minutes before Hagru had marshalled together the right words, in the right order. 

“Aight. So once a bunch of rats fled a fiery house, except the fiery house was actually a land sinking under waves and the rats were us. Orcs. And there were many other beings with them; cats and mice and some blasted elves who grew trees out of their eyes. And being that now they were in a whole new house, the orcs were a little lost. They wandered and wandered, looking for places to go. Some of them went and found mountains with really no one living in them at all, some of them settled in the woods where the light couldn’t reach. But some, some were foolish. Some thought that now that the shadow that had plucked them out of the earth and made them was gone they were just the same as anyone else.  That they were free.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I, most of the time. It’s one of those stories. A lot of the details have gone to rot and all that’s left are the bones. So the orcs go looking for a place to be free. They found an awful lot of places to try, and each place was not right. Finally, the desperate and hungry, pursued by the unrelenting sun, the orcs stumbled upon a human village. Once they might have sacked it but this time they were too weak. All they could do was huddle in the shadow of a cottage and hope. Then, the strangest thing happened. A human came out and offered them help. 

See the humans here hadn’t heard of orcs before. It was so very far afield, north and east and further than wind could see, that the men did not know what we were made of. Even though they were right jumpy, what with the teeth and looks, they were willing to put that aside and offer a hand. Very forgiving these humans— that’s how you know it’s a story. 

Frightened and—” Hagru spat, “hopeful, the orcs accepted. And they made a place in the village. They hunted their meat at night in the forests, and worked the fields in the shade, and didn’t kill a single soul. They remade themselves, as they were once remade. And they hoped they could be free. The humans, for their part, benefited greatly. They’d been in a bit of a feud with their neighbouring village and now those other humans stayed well away.

All this time, the orcs had been living in their own shelters on the outskirts of town, and the humans in their own little hovels. No room for anyone else, you know how it is. But then one night the orcs got it in their heads to invite their neighbors to a feast. Fresh deer, good drink, whatever it is. And the humans came and they feasted, and then, for the best course, the orcs presented the body of one of the men from the village down the way? Because what is better than to crack the marrow of your enemies?”

The alarm on that smooth face was almost worth the telling. In orcish circles it got quite the opposite reaction— although most orcs knew how humans would react it was agreed that there was little better than to rip out the heart of the foe and consume it. Hagru had jiggled the narrative quite a bit to preserve the— what was it called?— element of surprise. 

“Just like you, girly, the humans didn’t like that at all. But they were schemers, those humans. They made their excuses, hustled their children and women out, and then came back at midday with torches. You should know as well as anyone how poorly we fare in the sun. Though these orcs did their level best to fight, in the end they were all killed. All because they tried to give the humans what they wanted. All because they tried to work as a team.”

Cytise’s wide forehead crinkled. “If all the orcs died, how do you know this story? Especially if it was in the north east, far away from where stories could reach.”
 

“Just do.” Hagru patted her shoulder. “I think the story came from the big eyeball, and he knows lots of things.”

“Oh. That actually, that actually does make sense, if that story came from Him.” More complex emotions wrinkled up Cytise’s face, but Hagru wasn’t in the business of reading human expression. She knew the one firmly pasted on when Cytise looked up, and that was Polite. 

“Are you sure you don’t want to stay for coffee?” The woman asked, and Hagru felt a sudden burst of affection. 

“Certain. I’ve stayed long enough as it is. They’re not my thing, events .”

“I’ll walk you—”

“I know the way downstairs.” 

She did end up letting herself out. 

Even if the night was a predictable disaster, she rather liked the woman at the center of it. There was something endlessly charming about humans who thought they could rework the world with a bit of good temper. They kept the business of tragedies booming.