To Kill a Hellkite

Hal:

I woke to see Abel staring at my face.

So I felt my upper lip. I thought I’d grown myself a stubble overnight, you see, and Abel’s got his but he’s older; Lori had one too, but he’s a dwarf and it ain’t fair, but there wasn’t the bit of hairy roughness I was expecting. And then I noticed I had this great red mark etched on my left cheek, probably where I lay on that old sack yesterday night as a pillow.

Bummer.

Well, anyway everybody was making breakfast and hitching up their horses, so I figured we’re pressing on early. Helene passed me a cold bannock and told me we’re less than three miles away from the elves. “And a good thing too.” She added. “They’d get us supplies, horses mostly, when there’s none to be had anywhere else. And early next morning we send our rangers and warriors out after the orc troupe, fully rested and all.”

“So are we moving on now to see the elves?”

“Your parents are.” She clapped me gently on the back of my head. “You stay here with me and the rest of the children, dear.”

“I felled a goblin once.” I felt the need to remind her. Alright, it was shot, battered, clubbed, stabbed and pinned to the ground by my father, but I landed the killing blow. Drove my knife deep into its chest. It was my kill. My kill. And my father clapped me hard on the back and called me a man (it hurt, but a man wouldn’t have minded).

But Helene just chuckled and told me I could go when I grew myself a proper beard.

My heart fell when I noticed she had more whiskers than me.

Conin:

My father used to teach me this battle hymn to play on the whistle. They lyrics meant something like, we killed a dragon, now we’re going to kill you, but I can’t sing and play at the same time.

He’d carry me on one arm, and march me around while I played the tune. And everybody would sing along. Lori was a great singer. I never quite understood the capacity of his lungs. And Abel always led the encore.

But now there’s nobody but Hal and Merc around. Merc was bawling off tune at the top of his voice and Hal kept saying I’m playing too fast.

“You sound like my tutor.” I growled, stopping my melody and glowering. “Too fast, too fast, slow down. You don’t feel the momentum without the speed.”

“Nor do you feel the headache.” Helene groaned. “Moppet, you might want to give the flute a break.”

“It’s a whistle.” I protested, “And I bet the headache came from his terrible singing.”

“Both of you.” Helene muttered. “Besides, I need you to stay sensible. Brandyn promised me he’d send a messenger by now. I may have to ride out for a while to check on him.” She ran a hand through my gnarled hair. “When I’m gone, darling, you’re in charge, you hear me? Keep the boys sensible. We don’t want them running off into the wild, do we?”

“It’s not fair.” Whined Hal. “I’m the oldest, and she’s a girl.”

“Well, I might let you in charge if you’d grow some girl sense.” Grunted Helene as she lifted herself to her feet and walked out into the dusty horizon.

“We’re in the middle of nowhere.” Said Merc, amused.

“Yes. And I’m in charge.” I grinned.

Mercury:

“I say we should go out looking for Helene.” I said. “I mean, right this moment she might be torn to pieces by any desert monstrosity. Think of the fangs sinking into her neck, blades piercing her back, claws… well, clawing her arms-”

“I think that means ‘We should go wandering about in the desert to kill orcs.’ No.” Conin said. “I know what you’re thinking.”

“I can’t even begin to believe you, Conin. Our nursemaid is now out in the wild being torn to tiny little bits for a vulture’s gullet, and you-”

“Don’t even try, Merc. You think I don’t know you.”

“Alright. Hal, you still have your knife?”

But Conin had to cut in rudely. “Whatever you’re going to do next, I ban it.”

“What if…” I grinned in her face. “What if we were going to cut your throat?”

Conin inhaled sharply with both hands over her throat. “That’s it.” She said at length, “Merc, you’re banned from talking at all. Say one more word, and I’ll make sure Helene spanks you. See if she won’t.”

I shrugged, but I know when to stop. Years of washing had turned that terror of a woman’s hands into solid steel. Besides, if an orc barged into camp right now, at least I can die assured that Conin is to blame.

And suddenly a barrel toppled over.

“Conin-” I started. “That’s it!” she yelled, “I’m telling!”

“Even if there’s an orc in camp?”

Hal:

That thing gave something that sounded like a howl of rage and darted my way with a crude blade. That’s it. My first orc. I gripped the handle of my knife and held my stance. But it was faking, the dog. I could see it springing right, just a foot away from me, aiming a stab at Merc.

“Went for my best friend, you cur.” I growled, slamming the pommel of my knife into its wrist. Its knife went flying. It fled. I flew after it. It swung a knobbed elbow around for my cheeks. I knocked it to the ground and pressed its nose into the sand.

I took a look at Merc, gasping feebly, a gash on his shoulder, and before I knew it, I was hammering on the back of the orc’s head with the pommel of my knife. I wasn’t really sure what to do. It’s twig-like limbs flailed from under my weight, and I just knocked on as if its head was a nail, until I was pretty sure it wouldn’t try to attack us.

Then I stopped and looked at Conin and Merc.

“Wait, now what?”

None of us really knew what to do. We never really thought of getting this far.

Conin:

So I stated the obvious. “We kill it, of course.”

“Knock a hole in its brain!” Merc hollered.

Hal looked at us helplessly. “No, I mean, where will we bury it after we killed it?”

“You know,” grunted a lisping voice from under him, “I would really appreciate being called a ‘her’.”

We didn’t expect that.

“There are she-orcs?” Merc winced in utter disgust at length.

“Pay no attention to it!” I nudged Merc. “So where will we bury this thing?”

“Well, we won’t have to. What if we took its scalp to Helene?” Another spark of genius from me.

“We’ll get spanked.” Hal answered immediately.

“We’ll get promoted.” I retorted.

“You sound like an adult.” Hal said, “And, well, I guess, we could try that, but…”

“How do you scalp an orc?” Merc tugged at his bottom lip.

“Oh, for goodness’s sake, you just…” Hal flipped the orc over and pressed his knife on its hairline.

“See, even you don’t know how.” Merc grinned.

“Well, I do too!” Hal grunted, “I was just thinking that they won’t take us seriously, and we’re probably not going to get to kill any actual orcs soon.”

“What, this orc isn’t actual?” I frowned.

“We can bury the body, again.” Merc ran some sand through his fingers. “Does blood soak through sand? Oh, it probably does. Maybe we can eat it?”

Hal laughed.

Hal laughed again, only this time he sounded a bit like a choking chicken.

Hal tried again, but he sounded more like a choking chicken than ever.

“Isn’t that cannibalism?”

Mercury:

“Cannibalism is when you eat another human – another creature of your race. Orcs aren’t humans.” I reasoned.

“Do you eat elves?”

It never really occurred to me that elves are edible to anything but dragons. I tried to imagine eating one, cooking one, nibbling one on his skin. Would it be crispy? Smooth? Soggy? I had no idea. I only knew it would be pretty gross.

“I guess you could… if you tried.”

“It’s just wrong.”

“Well, it’s not wrong!” I wrung my hands. “Think of the three little pigs.”

“What, that old bedtime story? Isn’t that just against carnivorism in general?”

“The big bad wolf fell into a boiling pot of water and the pigs had him for dinner.”

Hal looked up into the sky.

“If the pigs ate the big bad wolf at the end, are they any different from him then?”

“Again, they didn’t try to knock his house down.” I stated.

“The wolf was trying to knock the pigs’ houses down because he was going to eat them. They would have done the same, perhaps.”

“You’re stalling, aren’t you?” I’ll bet he doesn’t know how to deal with an orc too. Suddenly, a thought struck me. He’s scared of dealing with the orc, the coward. He was going to let it go.

“I’m not!”

 “Well, you better not be. You let it go, it’ll bring a whole troupe of murderers in here the next day.”

“She,” the orc under Hal reminded us.

“Stop wagging that tongue of yours.” Conin tapped the side of her cheek with her boot.

“Wait!” I gave Conin a look. “Let it wag that tongue. We’ll interrogate it.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Hal breathe a sigh of relief. I better be delusional, because if he lets it go, I will make it my personal duty to cut him into a hundred tiny pieces.

Hal:

I don’t know why I started breathing normally when I lifted the knife from her head.

I don’t even know why I wasn’t breathing normally before that. Nobody’s dying. Nobody’s dying but the orc. And that’s a good thing, at any rate.

Is it?

Mercury lifted her by the hair. “Now, what do you want of our camp? You were probably expecting a full camp of warriors, weren’t you.”

“I came for supplies.”

“Thief!” Conin spat, kicking her in the face. Mercury picked up a rock and aimed for her head.

“Wait!” I grabbed his arm. “She’s a lady. You can’t raise a hand against a lady. The code says so.”

“A slut, more like. And just so you know…” he pushed ferociously against my grip, “The code also says we should let no evil be!”

“Don’t use that word.” I pressed him against a barrel. “Did you see her kill anybody?”

“She stole from us. And almost killed me. Did you notice that it was going to kill you too? You fought it. You hit it in the head. You know it!”

The wolf. He did blow down two houses. He did try to eat the three little pigs. Yet… yet if the three little pigs ate him in the end, does it make them any better than the wolf?

“If we were going to kill her at the end, does it make us any better than her?”

“You’re speaking like a woman!” Mercury slipped his hand out of mine in disgust. “All weakness and wishy-washy kindness. You’re going to have to realize that kindness is for the good only.”

“And can you judge if she is good?”

“I know it’s not.”

I bent down to the orc, slumped against the wheel of a wagon. Bruised and ragged, yet a woman. Yet a woman. “Will you promise not to tell your tribesmen about us?”

“No.”

“Even if we let you go?”

“Maybe I’d tell…” she wound a lock of coarse hair around a finger. “Maybe not. You have done too much anyway. We’d like to be on the upper hand for a change.”

“What do you mean?” frowned Conin.

Conin:

It brushed a strand of hair from its face. “Last year, your people took Gazel from us. My brother was there. Barely a year old. And I ran. I ran and I hid. After the mess the streets were washed with blood. I saw him, Vregu, my baby brother, impaled on one of those spear things they had. He was not dead, no, he was alive! He was alive. And bawling at the top of his voice. But he was beyond help. Bleeding out.

“I could never forget the sight of his blood trailing down that spear, caught on the tongues of soldiers. If I had a spear too, I would have thrust it into that man’s chest… tasted his blood… spat it into his face as they did… It’s not barbarism, not it’s not. It’s revenge. And I couldn’t do that either, because I’m a girl and I don’t have a toothpick to fight with.”

Mercury picked up her flint-like knife and flipped it over in his hand.

“That knife, you mean.” She grinned broodingly. “It came from a little boy. A human boy. He was riding out with his flock of sheep. I killed him.”

I stared at her… I mean its face. It had those dark flecks in her pupils like Hal, hazel, innocent. Of course she would have killed the boy. But why?

“Yes, I killed him!” it lifted her eyes to meet mine. “I strangled him. With a hand. With both hands. He had that knife with him and then I used it and, I killed him, my hands are stained with his blood, but who cares because they’ve killed thousands of orc children anyway, thousands and thousands of them, and one is nothing, and I’m vermin…”

Her eyes brimmed up, but she kept them painfully open, to stop her tears from squeezing out, perhaps. “I’m vermin, really. Nothing but a piece of grit. You can kill me. They should have paraded me around on a spear long ago, no, that’s too good for grit like me, I should’ve been trampled under their horses long, long ago…”

She turned my face away with a coarse hand, so I won’t see her scour her eyes with the rough material of her sleeve.

I walked back to Hal. “You win,” I sighed. “I guess I couldn’t pity her as a warrior – I could though, as a human. Let her go.”

And quick as a bolt, Merc’s fist came swinging for Hal’s face.

Mercury

I glared at the spreading patch of blackish bruise spreading over Hal’s cheek. “That’s treachery, you hear me? Treachery. She’ll kill all of the kids. She’ll murder our troupe.”

But suddenly he laughed out loud. A little too long and too choppy to be convincing perhaps, but he was laughing, laughing for all he’s worth. “What’s so funny?” I snapped. He clung onto his belly. “You called her a she! You called her a she, you just did. She’s a human, no, not a human, a person, you admitted! No taking it back now-”

I shut him up with another bruise on his right cheek. “So it’s a person, so what? Didn’t it kill a boy? A defenseless child. It’s a murderer, just like the rest of the birds it flocks with, I tell you-”

“Can I just say Merc, she did kill a kid, but we, I mean our parents killed so many of their kids, and didn’t feel sorry about it. But she did, she did!” Conin pushed feebly, with both hands, against my chest as I was going to hurl a knife at the orc. “She did feel sorry, would you? Would you have felt sorry for the kids you would have killed?”

And suddenly she was angry. Tearing blindly at my hair, at my ears. “I bet you were dreaming all day, were you, of plunging into their houses and smashing cradles. You wouldn’t have flinched twice before you stabbed one of their kids, would you? Would you! You’d have trampled them under your hooves, marched them through the streets on your spear, and you wouldn’t have felt sorry for them!”

She gasped for breath and backed away. She stood just three steps away from me, breathing heavily for an unreasonably long moment. I felt the hilt of the dagger in my wet palms, with the boy’s dying grip etched on its rough, skin chaffing surface. Or was it the she-orc’s frustrated grasp?

“What are you, I wonder.” Conin snarled, but she didn’t have the tusks to complete the picture. “A person, are you? Or a monster. Maybe you’re the monster and she’s the person. The orcs you would’ve killed. What do you think they are? Prey? Vermin? What are they but lives?”

I just remembered how I felt my cheeks burn when I told the she-orc to go, to run for her life. And I remembered how I thought she would come tomorrow with an army to cut my throat, when I saw her wade through the sand, to the horizon.

But I also remembered. She isn’t vermin. She’s a single life, proud and worthy on its own.