It was evening, but the air was warm, and redolent with the smell of hot pork, turning slowly under the watchful eye of the tribe’s master smokers. Norska loved smoked pork, and so he loved the human caravans that would occasionally pass through Findo Gask on their way east. Visitors meant feasts, because no orc worth his tusks (not that Norska was old enough to have any tusks yet) would risk offending a stranger who might be Bahgtru or Ilneval in disguise, and so end up cursed for the rest of their days. Treat guests as you would the gods, Norska’s mother was fond of saying, in that wise, gravelly voice of hers.
Peering down the hill, Norska saw the humans were beginning to unpack and unfold their shelters in preparation for the night’s stop, and recognised the distinctive green and yellow stripes on one of the tents that had already gone up. That was guildsman Meriadus’ tent - the merchant took the Cinnamon Road every six months or so, and while the big bearded trader had little time for young orcs capering around his feet, he always travelled with his family, and his kindly mother always had sweets and stories for the children. Stories were the other thing Norska loved about the caravans - tales he hadn’t heard before, news from far-off lands and fables steeped in alien culture. He would often turn them over in his head afterwards, drawing parallels with old orcish tales and pondering over the differences.
Norska scrambled his way down the hill, stumbling twice on rocks and potholes. He was a ropey, gangly youth, all knees and elbows, and his brain was still working out where his limbs ended after his last growth spurt. One-eyed Malka shouted at him to watch it, and he nearly ran into Nilda who was rolling a barrel of the strong, hop-bitter ale that orcs favoured down towards the feast hall. When he skidded to a halt at the door-flap of Meriadus’ tent, he found that a number of his friends were already there, sitting cross-legged on the woven mats. Meriadus’ mother sat at the back of the tent amid a nest of cushions. She was a small woman, even by human standards; brown as a nut, and with glossy black hair. When she smiled, her face became a friendly maze of wrinkles.
“Norska!” she called out in accented but passable orcish. “My, you’ve gotten big! Are you going to be a big, burly blacksmith some day?”
Norska’s beaming smile that the human had recognised him on sight faltered a little, when one of the other children - a bright-eyed, pug-nosed girl named Rakana who lived three doors down from him - blew a raspberry through her budding tusks. “Norska never knows what he wants to be!”
Norska scowled. That wasn’t quite true - it was just that what he wanted to be changed with the moons. A few weeks ago he had wandered through Nilda’s alehouse and thought about how fine it would be to be a master brewer, until he realised that there was only one secret recipe, and how boring would that get after a while? The month before that he had glimpsed a trade carrack making its way down the coast and had imagined himself a sailor, before thinking that scrubbing decks and splicing ropes all day probably wouldn’t give him much time to read.
“You’d better pick soon, Norska.” one of the other children said, nodding along with Rakana. “My sister Aleeza’s only a year older than you and she’s already joined the paladins.”
Norska looked at the ground and kicked at a pebble that had trailed in on someone’s sandal. It was an easy choice for Aleeza - she had always been rangy and athletic, keen-eyed and competitive. She was a natural fit for the paladins who were so widely sought as guards and drill instructors across the Province; she was always going to be a paladin. She might get funny looks from the humans who didn’t so often recruit girls into such roles, but that was because they hadn’t heard the story of the chieftan-god Gruumsh, back in the days when he was still proud and prickly, and had forbidden his wife Luthic from bearing arms because he was there to protect her. Luthic had grown her fingernails into swords and gone out and killed a bear with them, just to make a point. No-one challenged an orc girl’s right to learn swordcraft after that.
Unfortunately, Norska was no good at swordcraft - at least not while his still-growing arms and legs made him so clumsy. “Easy for Aleeza.” he mumbled.
“Now now.” Meriadus’ kindly mother broke in over the chattering children. “Let him speak. What do you think, Norska?”
Norska shuffled his feet again. He knew he had to give a grown-up answer this time. His friends would laugh if he mentioned sailors, or rangers, or temple scholars in far-off Madrigal.
“I s’pose I might be a blacksmith,” he ventured, “Or a farmer…something like that, maybe.”
“Maybe?” the human woman asked, with her wrinkly smile.
Norska shrugged. “It’s what most other folk around here do?” He realised that he had inflected it as a question, and flushed a darker green with embarrassment. One or two of the children giggled, though Rakana rubbed the back of her neck, as if sorry that her jibe had touched on a sore spot.
Meriadus’ mother hmm’d low in her throat, and leaned forward from her cushions to pat the woven rush mat. “Come and sit down with the others, Norska. I’m going to tell you a story.”
That perked Norska up a bit, and had a similar effect on the other children, who began to whisper excitedly as they shuffled closer.
“This story,” the human woman began, “Is about a woman named Morgana.”
“Who’s Morgana?” one of the younger orcs immediately interrupted, one finger up his nose. His neighbour punched him lightly in the arm.
“Hush and I’ll tell you.” the woman chuckled. “Morgana is a witch. A very old witch. She was around in my grandmother’s time, and yet she’s still making mischief out in the wild places today.”
That didn’t seem possible to Norska, given what he knew of human lifespans, but he kept quiet. He didn’t want Rakana or Horza punching him in his own skinny arms.
“Some say she’s mad, or evil, but I don’t think so. I’ve heard a story about how she helped a bat who didn’t want to fly.”
“A bat?” repeated Zagura, wrinkling her freckled nose.
“A bat.” the old human woman confirmed. “You see, Morgana had a problem. She needed a fresh bat’s wing for a potion she was crafting, but she couldn’t figure out how to get one without tricking or hurting the bat. Unlike some wizards, she disliked harming innocent creatures to further her own ends.”
The children looked quizzically at each other. The vaunted orcish paladins swore similar oaths, though they didn’t usually extend their pledge to animals.
“For many nights she used secret arts to ride the wind across the mountain tops, speaking to the animals she found there, trying to find a solution to her problem. One particularly stormy night she took shelter in a cave, and found a lone bat waiting there, where his friends had all flown away. Instead of hanging upside down to rest like most bats do, he was crawling around on the floor, clumsy with his leather wings. Morgana asked him what he was doing. He said he was pretending to be a field mouse.”
A ripple of laughter ran through the children, and Meriadus’ mother smiled.
“Yes, it must have looked quite strange. Morgana asked the bat why he was doing such a thing, and he said it was because he hated flying. He was scared of heights, he said, and of the dark.”
Rakana blew another raspberry. Norska listened.
“He said he had never told any of his friends because he was afraid they would laugh at him, but because Morgana was a stranger and a witch besides, he decided to share his secret dream with her. He said that he wanted to be able to climb the wheat stalks in the fields, and feel the sun on his face. He said he wanted to be able to eat berries from the bush, and build a snug little nest of straw and feathers so he could sleep through the night and the long cold of winter. Morgana asked him wouldn’t he miss being a bat, roosting with his friends in the cave and flitting from stalactite to stalactite. The bat said that he would miss the other bats, but if they were truly his friends they would come and visit him in the field. But it was all just a dream anyway, because he could not climb up wheat stalks or wriggle into bushes with his big, clumsy wings. And that was when Morgana had an idea.”
The children had gone quiet now.
“Morgana made a deal with the bat. She offered to give him little paws instead of wings, if he would allow her to keep the wings for her potion. The bat agreed. Morgana spoke some magic words, and the bat’s hands began to change - his long, stretched finger bones became little dextrous claws, and Morgana was left with the leather that had once stretched between them. The bat was overjoyed, waving his new little paws in delight and showing them to all the other bats as they flew back to roost, which left many of them scratching their heads.”
The children giggled again.
“After the bat had said his goodbyes, Morgana carried him down to a hedgerow where he could make his new home, and watched as he climbed stalks of grass, and ate berries, and made a warm, snug nest to sleep through the winter.”
“Now then.” the woman finished, folding her hands in her lap. “What do you think Morgana learned from that experience?”
“That there’s always a way to get what you want without hurting anyone?” Zagura guessed.
Horza clicked his tongue. “Tch. If you’re lucky enough to know a wizard, maybe.”
“What about the bat?” asked the young orc in the front row, who was picking his nose once again. “I mean, the field mouse?”
“He learned,” the smiling woman answered, her dark eyes flitting in Norska’s direction. “That what you’re born with matters, and what your friends want matters too, but what you want, and what you decide to do matters most of all.”
Norska realised that he was grinning as he felt a new certainty grip him. Maybe it would be gone within a moon’s turn just like all his other ideas, and only time would tell on that front. But right now he knew. He was sure. He didn’t just want to be the bat. He wanted to be the one who helped the bat. He wanted to be like Morgana.
He wanted to be a wizard.
Black Cauldron Circle (Updates Every Two Days)
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