Knight Roland's guts, strewn all over the marble ground by Angamaite

Knight Roland's guts, strewn all over the marble ground

When the Eldar sworn to Oromë's train broke their bows and followed Fëanáro's thirdborn son into exile, they didn't expect the fight to be as full of philosophical conundrums and monstrous anatomy as it turned out to be. Or as doomed.

Read Knight Roland's guts, strewn all over the marble ground

“I think that’s a tapeworm.” 

Someone hands him pincers, a tray. The mesentery keeps getting in the way; as if the thickened tissue of the small intestine wasn’t making this hard enough. Three more incisions. 

“Definitely a tapeworm. Fish, deer?” Tyelkormo peers over his shoulder. 

“How the fuck should I know?” Foinelen rolls his eyes. The white ribbon of the worm is carefully unspooled, deposited on the tray in three fragments. “My mastery was in carnivores, not helminths.”

“Which are among the preferred final hosts of various species of helminths--”

“Your mouth can be the preferred host for my cock. I don’t know what kind of tapeworm it is.”

“Write that down, write that down!” Insilarquen nudges the apprentice in charge of the notes with his sharp elbow. 

Ríalos paces around to the other end of the table. “In my opinion it is, first and foremost -- a dead one.”

“Ai, hear! An expert has spoken!” 

“It’s not of primary interest, regardless.” Under the white cloth on his face, Foinelen’s lips twist. The scalpel opens the stomach; empty. “More than half of all the orcs I have studied have been infected with tapeworms. My estimate is around sixty, sixty-five per-cent. Nearly all of them carry either hookworms, pinworms or another type of roundworm, most more than one. Some become intermediate hosts and develop cysticerci, although that is significantly rarer.” The intestine and stomach are tentatively removed to access the renal system and liver. “Flukes are also extremely common, but rarely deadly.”

Laureo washes his hands immediately after touching it. “What’s the most tapeworms you’ve ever found in a single orc?” 

“Seven.”

“That’s a lot of fucking tapeworms.”

“Oh, Nessa’s tits, look at this.” Tyelkormo’s voice -- and scalpel -- cut him off before any further conversation on flatworms can proceed. “I think that’s the biggest fucking gallstone I’ve ever seen in my life.” 

“It’s bigger than its eyeballs.” 

“Bigger than its testes as well.” 

“Those set a low bar. Write only the eyeball comparison down.”

“Right. The kidneys--?”

“The kidneys appear nominally in order, at least compared to this year’s thirty-four in which only one massive horseshoe-shaped kidney was found. No abnormal growths.”

“Remove them, I’ll sketch them so we can compare.”

“Do a cross-section to get the renal pyramids in. Ríalos, can you take over there?”

“Of course. And Insilarquen, please fumigate your smock after handling that tapeworm before you go to the kennels.”

 

It is said, among the Sindar and the Laiquendi and the Avari, that orcs were once elves.

It is also said that orcs were bred from beasts, tormented until their hate took the shape of something that resembles will. Shaped from clay, breathed life into; Moricotto had raised mountains to the sky, and Nerdanel Istarnië once carved statues so lifelike that they could be mistaken for the living -- who’s to say that something could not exist between the two? Some say they were moulded from dead flesh in facsimile of the elves themselves and that is why orcs steal bodies from the battlefields, but because Moricotto knew nothing of love and true creation, he could not lend them a spark of anything but fear and hatred. One particularly drunken Avarin trader claimed they were bred from elves, forced to rut with boars and apes and wolves under the Dark One’s dominion over the spirit that would chain them to their bodies. 

Foinelen Astalórë denies the second on behalf of clear differences between the mental faculties of language in which the orcs resemble incarnates more than beasts, discards the third as patently untrue without a second thought, interrogates as many captive scouts as possible until the fourth is disproven -- orcs can create things of their own, and not only weapons and lies, but embellishments, stories, linguistic systems and feats of crude but effective engineering -- and plies the fifth to sleep with another chalice of a particularly potent wormwood spirit before a diplomatic incident can be caused. The first, he shelves at the back of his mind as something of low priority. 

He is already a kinslayer. More than once over, if thralls driven mad by the Foe’s grasp over their minds count. It makes no difference to him if some orcs understand Quenya, nominally forbidden by Elwë’s largely ignored decree, because they had learned it from thralls or because they had once been thralls. 

He interrogates the living, dissects the dead, then he executes the first to do the same as with the second. And he amasses a veritable hoard of knowledge about every facet of their anatomy, all their mutations, bone-spurs and cancers, every which way their bodies differ from those of the Eldar (And every which way they don’t. It is valuable information, to the soldiers.), every difference between their life-stages and the odd, twisted thrum of the Song in their bodies, every deviation of their dialects and linguistic shift and school of troop-specific jargon, every semblance of social order enforced amongst the bands, either by Moricotto and his lieutenants or the orcs themselves. He attempts, multiple times, to devise a classification system that would paint a reasonable framework explaining the development of their twisted shapes; he never quite succeeds, but he fills many shelves with neatly preserved organs and tissues, and more with books full of detailed anatomical drawings that have no equal in all of Beleriand. He torments the captives that officially do not exist with mind, sword and flame until they admit that orcs are bred and born, until they acquiesce that yes, some orcs you have met before, and some orcs you will meet again, so keep your throat covered, Leech-fingers, because it is very white and very tender and many would kill among themselves for a bite. 

He loses it all in the Dagor Bragollach, when Amon Anglach burns. What he does not lose is the knowledge that still lives in his memory, and the burning need to fill its gaps.

He cannot continue doing it the same way in Nargothrond as he would in Himlad, and he does not have the time often, regardless -- Tyelkormo names him Lieutenant in the wake of Alcarnor’s passing -- but he and his prince go back a long way, and there is always a loophole that can be found, always heads that can turn the other way. 

There are more orcs that seem to understand Quenya at least in a fragmentary manner, those days. Foinelen, Laureo, and the rest of those who’d once repudiated Oromë’s charge head east on their exiled lieges’ heels, and don’t look twice if the ones they cut down on the way seem a little less alien than the ones that had first encountered them on the eastern shores. 

After the Nírnaeth Arnoediad, his records become sparse. Torment is more about vengeance than knowledge, and beside that, Amon Ereb has a dearth of parchment that can scarcely be wasted on documenting the peculiarities of orcish anatomy. 

(Torment is about nothing else than torment itself. It is hard to take orcs captive when any small patrol tries to flee as soon as they hear the Hunt’s horns on the horizon, smell the blood soaked into their gambesons. The ones they do catch do not often end up in cells anyway; Tyelkormo has taken to more ostentatious methods of disposal, and his troop howls like jackals as they do his bidding and nail hands to tree-trunks to mark their passage.)

After the Nírnaeth Arnoediad, the disgusting verisimilitude between orcs and elves that reaches uncomfortably beyond that which can be shrugged off as Moricotto’s intent is something akin to an open secret among the Fëanárian ranks, as is the fact that some orcs will hear a word of Quenya, or a turn of phrase from a specific scientific discipline, or a soldiers’ call, or see the gleam of eight-pointed stars on blued plate, and they will turn mad and scream until death takes them. It becomes something of a game -- tie an orc to a tree, and taunt it until you find the thing that will make it bite through its tongue and choke. Foinelen is very good at these games.

After Doriath, they hardly ever use orcs for anything else. Nelyafinwë tries to rein them in for the sake of order, stop the wanton slaughter, direct the surviving huntsmen and knights to a better use of their time; they laugh in his face when he calls them orc-like. Laureo even mocks him for parroting Turukáno. They are only trailing him and Kanafinwë because there is no one else left. Tyelkormo, whose camping bed is full of ashes and marked with bloody fingers only those who've shared it can find now, would have wanted it.

Only sometimes, when it is very dark and quiet on a night patrol, does he still think about the origin of orc-kind and the nature of their life. 

He isn’t thinking about it when he’s lying on a cot and doesn’t have the strength to insist it’s useless to amputate any more of his arm and everything he’s ever taught his apprentices is worth fuck-all now, because the poison is already invading his blood-stream and he knows it, and if the second revision didn’t save him, the third will not be any more successful even if the bleeding doesn’t kill him first. He’s thinking about Oromë, who had blessed him and then abandoned him. He’s thinking about Tyelkormo, who didn’t. He’s thinking about the Doom that must surely lie on them, because death is so much more dark and cold in person than mere exsanguination should be--

And he’s not, not even for an instant, thinking about following Námo’s voice, because the bastard surely only wants them for recrimination and gloating. Foinelen will heed no coward again, no matter how divine. 

 

---

 

The orc called Guts is born twice in Angband. The first time is uneventful; some kind of hand twists around his throat while he is still in the pits, the kind that belongs to a thing much bigger than he, and makes something snap. Guts does not get up. 

The second time, he is summoned to breed, and the thing’s (woman, the thing is called a woman, even though everyone knows that orcs do not have any women, the only differentiation between them that is of any note is who fucks and who is fucked over) thin white hair snarles in his hands so that she must turn to look at him -- she is enraged and in pain and calls him something particularly crude as she claws his face to let go, and Guts dashes her head against the ground until everything is covered in brain matter. Then, he bites through his tongue the way he remembers he should, and his teeth are sharp enough to do it quickly.

(She calls him a bastard Golodh, and a robber, and the white one’s cock-sucker, and Guts may not remember what the white one’s name was, but he remembers that he has killed for him before and that he would do it again. He also remembers that killing doesn’t make any of the pain go away.) 

(The Crucible is no better.)

He is born in Angband again, after that, and this time lives long enough to see golden and white armies marching from the south and the west under banners that are vaguely familiar. But there are so many banners, perhaps it’s only natural pattern-seeking behaviour looking for a shred of familiarity to hate. 

Someone warns him not to look at the sky. So he doesn’t. 

He counts his losses when the armies get too close, and takes his wargs, and runs for the mountains; he remembers that he has once been a pragmatic man. Orc. Elf. Whatever he was. Blood is sickly sweet and bones are white in all of them.

(He does not look at the sky because he hears of orcs that have gone mad at the sight of stars, and that is stupid, and even though he hates the thing that made the stars as much as he hates the Sun, and Elves, and Men that fraternise with Elves, and Men that don’t, and horses, and hounds, and nightingales, and the Dark Lord, and other orcs and everything else in the world, Guts isn’t stupid. He knows by now that it is worse in the Crucible -- and orcs that go mad tend to die, he has seen it, he knows it, that madness has pointed teeth one of which is silver and a voice the like of which he hasn’t heard in years -- so he looks away and does not turn his eyes up if the sky isn’t clouded.)

He lives, he rides wargs and hunts Men and Elves and sometimes other Orcs in indiscriminate fashions, and the shadow in the north breaks; another one rises in the east. He lives, he spits blood, his bones break and grow back together at odd angles but functioning, even if painful, he pukes bile when he eats too much nightshade, he strikes his kidneys with his fist when they hurt too much, he loses two fingers on the left hand and replaces them with a claw that can gouge another orc’s eye out with a slap, he coughs out thin white worms that make his lungs hurt like hell until he doesn’t, he is knocked out, he gets up again, he gets up again, he gets up again. 

He hears about orcs that remember that they were elves, and shrugs it off as irrelevant. They all sometimes catch wind of languages they understand even though they aren’t orcish, or hear a familiar song; they all know orcs don’t come from the dirt. There is no point in going mad over it. Living as an orc is not that hard, if one doesn’t count all the parasites.

(They do not, in fact, all carry a memory like that at the back of their mind, but Guts does not care about the lives of other orcs, especially those that aren’t as strong, as fast, as rational as he is, because he has once ridden at the right hand of a man more ruthless, reckless and decisive than any of them. The law of the sword dictates that you shall not bow to a weaker man. And before that, he has--)

He’s killed, an arrow through the back so that he can’t see the fletching, chokes on his blood.

(He thinks he can see familiar faces in the Crucible, sometimes, but he would not put it behind the place’s design to torment the orcs in one more way. It’s all starting to make sense, the manner in which souls are caught and incarnated, ebbing back and forth under the Dark Lord’s will, but he does not know what to do with this knowledge any longer.)

He’s born again. He rides wargs and drinks sweet blood and eats raw flesh when he can, and rotting when he cannot. Sometimes he allows other warg-riders to trail behind him to take advantage of his strength; sometimes he slaughters them for refusing to heed his commands, getting distracted by petty things, not knowing the lay of blades as well as he. He doesn’t need weak companions. 

He pukes blood and he pisses blood and he swallows it back down when it comes rushing up his throat for whatever reason, he licks it off his wounds and off his dinner. It’s a small price to pay. He’s strong, and even other orcs fear him, and he likes the stench of fear almost as much as he likes the thrum of blood in his ears when he’s chasing them down. 

 

He likes it until a band of orcs he’s killed before gangs up on him to take their revenge, and ties him to a tree, and while they’re gouging his eye out and cutting slivers off his fingers one of them suggests cutting him loose so that they could hunt him, and Guts remembers the thing that he used to hunt with, that was sometimes chasing them and sometimes letting them chase him, and he remembers the prince with a white falcon and silver stars emblazoned on his breast--

And he screams, he bites through the ropes, he bites through throats, he screams, he bites, he tears, he screams, he screams until he has bled out from a wound on his thigh and then he dies again. 

(He screams all the way through the Crucible of Souls, if disembodied, ravaged spirits can still scream. He screams because he knows he’s seen Tyelkormo again at least once, in life or in death, but he does not know if any of his other brethren are here and he cannot be sure -- and he knows the theoretical concept of brotherhood, of love, of pride, of faith and loyalty so overwhelming that it makes you lay your life down for another , but not how they exist beyond words cobbled together out of a dozen languages and an empty space holed out in his soul -- and he knows that he should have been hunting the beasts that scour and prowl the lands, not joining them, and all their blessings have not been any good, because the thing that used to hunt with them, one of the few that his memory struggles to find words for, abandoned them no matter how much they prayed and fought and killed and died, and if they cannot rely on him, then what relief is there in the world for any of them? Because he knows they were doomed, not by their exile but by their very conception, and he can do nothing but scream, and scream, and scream. 

The dead don’t have any lungs. He screams for a very long time.)

He’s born in Mordor, and he becomes a commander, and he dies.

(The fact that it is a Man of the West to cut him down makes him scream in the Crucible again.)

He’s born in the Misty Mountains. He fights, because if there is anything that he does not fully hate, it’s fighting. It’s the taste of blood on his tongue and the thrill of swinging down. 

 

He gets a squad of warg-riders again. Together, they can raze villages in the foothills of the Misty Mountains more easily, and they rarely worry about having their bellies full. They don’t remember how to do flanking manoeuvres and brew flesh-rotting poisons the way he does, and none of them is a better shot than he is, but they are efficient enough. He does not puke blood as often in those years. 

 

He hears about Goblin-town when it is still a growing village in the depths of some rank caves, but the thought makes him laugh. There is nothing about that which he needs for himself. The Great Goblin sounds like a fucking joke. 

 

He does, however, leap at the opportunity to bring him the head of that goblin Ulk once the bounty has been called again, and he brings the carcass nailed to a thin branch of beech that he throws at the feet of the Great Goblin, who was once--

Well, it does not matter who he was, because they weren’t on good terms. He doesn’t care to help him, he doesn’t know anything about the water -- intentionally drowning yourself just sounds stupid -- and he laughs at the suggestion that the water could ever favour an orc. He takes his prize and leaves.

( Nothing and no one favours an orc. They are more thoroughly dispossessed than they’ve ever thought they could be.)

(Screaming is also starting to seem stupid.)

He rides, he hunts, he kills, he takes whatever he can claim. He remembers that he used to do it in a body that did not ache and fail and protest like this one, but it was not that different after all -- the only thing missing is a thing that never truly was.

(He does remember that it was the huntsmen that had repudiated the starlight-song-white-teeth thing, the Hunter, not dark but fever-bright, and not the other way around. It doesn’t matter, though. What he sometimes catches a shadow of, lingering at the back of his mind, is not a memory but an ignis fatuus of impossible desire. And that’s even stupider than staring at the stars, which he finds was either an unsubstantiated rumour, or rendered irrelevant by the fact that he now remembers every time he tastes blood.)

He rides, he hunts, he kills, he takes whatever he can claim and he does not allow himself to become tired of it. 

(He is so very tired of it.)

(But there is nothing else. So he goes on.)

(He thinks this is not the first time he’s thought that.)

(But the one thing he will not do, the one thing he does not know how to do, is -- anything else.)

He dies again before he can find -- Tyelkormo, his name was Tyelkormo, before he can offer him his sword again, before they are free again.

(He thinks this, too, has happened before.)

---

Chapter End Notes

Name meanings:
Foinelen - Q, 'hidden star'
Astalórë - Q, 'brave-heart'

Inquiries about the nature of orcs can be found in Elves, once. Inquiries about the nature of Oromë's hunt, Celegorm's closest personal circle of followers, Fëanárian military leadership and Fëanárian war crimes as depicted by me can be directed below or to my discord.

also posted on Ao3