Moonthread, chapter 4

DON'T TOUCH ME

CHAPTER FOUR
DON’T TOUCH ME

“I’ve never seen so many people before,” Nala said.

Gran nodded as they walked closer.

On the other side of the sea of tents was town, and it was town on a festival night. Every fire was lit, and every instrument was out. Nala could hear it from the lip of the valley.

“Strange,” mumbled Gran Akha, as much to herself as to Nala.

“Strange? What’s strange?”

Gran shrugged, looking pale. “Just… so many people.”

“Ah,” Nala said, nodding. She tongued her tusk and thought, Sore. She had been looking forward to growing up, but no one had told her that it would hurt so much.

Gran Akha stared down at the valley. She had a wan look in her eye, like something had eaten all her joy.

Nala looked for something to say.

“Wh-why is that?”

“Huh?” grunted Gran. “Why’s what what?”

Nala shrugged. “Why so… many people? Do you think?”

Gran tried to shrug, shook her head instead.

“Are they pilgrims?” Nala asked.

Gran shook her head sadly. “No,” she said.

“What then?”

Gran Akha’s eyes slouched as she spoke.

“Refugees maybe?” she said. “That’s my guess. Refugees.”

Nala’s eyes scrunched. “What’s a refu—? What’s that?”

Gran’s brow scrunched. “Depends.”

“On what?”

“Depends on who you ask.”

“I’m asking you.”

She thought a long time before answering.

“A refugee,” Gran said, “is someone who is running.

Nala nodded slowly. “Running? What are they running from?”

Gran Akha shrugged. “War. Probably war.”

War, Nala thought.

Big word.

Scary word.

“Who’s…? What war?” Nala asked.

“Who knows,” said Gran. It was not a question.

“I thought that the war already happened,” said Nala.

“There will always be a war,” said Akha. “And if there is not a war, there will always be one brewing. It is the way of things.”

Nala had never seen this side of Gran. Bitter. Hopeless. Certain.

“There is only War, & Before,” her Gran said.

Then she made a little prayer.

“Ugru below, keep us.”

It was strange. For the first time, Nala felt a little bulb of energy in her body’s center, the very deep center of her.

The energy was pulling, like a planet pulls on a moon.

And what was pulled toward her? Nala’s belly pulled Gran’s words. It drank them. The root of Nala’s spine drank those words in, like a candle that drinks air to stay lit. She closed her eyes, and felt the swell, and thought the words back to gran-gran:

Ugru below, keep us.

The darkness in Nala’s belly swelled. The moon above hummed, mmmMMM, then the night went back to normal.

“Well!” Gran Akha said with sudden conviction. “Let’s get this over with. Take my hand?”

She put her hand out, and looked down at Nala with a forced smile.

Nala smiled back and took it. The night hummed as their hands touched.

“With me, okay?”

Nala nodded. “Can I ask you a question?”

“You just did,” Gran chided. “But sure.”

“H-how did you do that?” Nala asked.

“Do what?” Akha said.

“That little prayer,” Nala said. “It was magic, but… If I say those words, nothing happens.”

Gran Akha smiled. “How do you know? Have you said the words?”

Nala blushed. “Well… no, but—”

“Words have power,” Gran Akha said. “And when you say them out loud, more so. The gods like hearing their own names, just as much as us orcs do.”

“Hm.”

It only works if you believe it, Nala thought.

And the darkness in her said, mmm, agreeing silently.

They went on. Town came closer to them, and so did the refugee camp.

The camp had sprouted up around the East Gate to town, like mold clinging to a wet edge of a breadloaf.

The moat was low, the music was loud, and both bridges were down. They always dropped both bridges on a festival night.

But the party and the light and the music all came from inside the town.

But outside…

Outside, night gloomed, grim as death. Only the night hugged the people who huddled around little grass fires and half-destroyed tents.

When they were close enough, Gran Akha’s whole demeanor changed.

Akha was a gentle old woman, notoriously gentle, gentle to a fault. (Nala got that from her!)

But she had actually been a soldier. Not for very long, but the battles she’d been in had been bad. Intense.

Four, if Nala remembered right. Four battles.

Usually, it was hard to imagine Gran Akha as a soldier. It just seemed so unlike her.

She was gran-gran! The soup witch! The storytelling, curtain crafting, apology blurting Gran!

But Nala saw it now.

They were close enough that Nala could make out faces. Expressions. Cheekbones.

As she looked, her mind went elsewhere. It drifted to the boy from her dreams, so starved that his lungs had become weak. His belly too, weaker with every dream she had. Weaker and weaker, each step costing more, each inhale more strained. She had felt it. She felt it almost every night now.

War.

That’s what Gran Akha had said.

Most of the faces Nala saw were blue-skinned orcs, with white or red irises. Some people had light blue skin, the shade of unfaceted sapphire, forgetting how to glitter at the moon’s touch.

War.

Others had dark blue skin, almost blue-black. One mother was so dirty, Nala couldn’t tell the color of her clothes, even under the full moon’s bright light. She held her sleeping youngest in her arms, while her three older kids crowded close around her, clinging to her cloak.

So many dry lips, Nala thought. So many scabbed faces. And the sounds…

Some old man with dry leathery blue skin was glaring at Nala. And his face was leered like a—

No, not at her.

Thank Ugru below, she thought, and in her belly there was a little murmer of some smiling darkness.

No. He wasn’t glaring at her.

He was glaring at Gran Akha.

“I-I-I’ve s-s-s-seen you!” he chattered. He pointed his finger.

“Excuse me?” said Akha.

“Y-y-y-you’ve got th-the… darkness! You’ve got the d-d-darkness on you, and—! and—! I—”

“Don’t,” Gran Akha said forcefully, standing completely still now. “Don’t come any closer.”

At first, he recoiled. But then he kept coming at her.

“Just like th-they… said! You’re—! Gonna free th-the—! Demon!”

Akha’s brow furrowed, angrily. “What?”

He kept pointing. The stranger’s stuttering through tuskless gums grew angry now.

“The Demon! You b—! Br—br-bring… the Demon! Mark me, gods! This witch will—!”

“That’s enough now,” Akha said.

The shadow in Nala’s belly swelled as Akha’s rage swelled.

He kept coming closer. His finger pointed, coming closer. All the crowd of hungry faces watched, as if entranced.

“This witch! Will br-b-bring the—!”

“Do not touch me!”

“Demon!”

The man pushed Gran, and she lost it.

Akha was always gentle, always meek, always had a question in her voice.

That Akha was gone. When her magic happened, she always looked angry. It was suddenly very easy for Nala to imagine Gran getting in a fight with a stranger. Not only did she suddenly become fierce in personality, she literally began to glow a dull red.

MmMmm… pulsed the darkness.

The darkness gave her power, for Akha was a sorceress, a daughter of Ugru. And she was of a line of orcs that could do magic. Akha Dagmur asserted herself among that fearful, starving people.

The man’s hand seared with glowing darkness where it touched Gran Akha’s cloak, and he pulled away with a yelp.

“Don’t! Touch me!” thundered Gran Akha.

The man cowered at first, then his fear melted into rage.

He did not speak, for he knew a killer when he saw one. He did not speak, but he let himself stare, and wear the hatred naked on his face.

You could tell by his clothes that he wasn’t from Orcshire. Though they were actually quite well made, they were thin. He was only wearing one shirt, and his pants were designed for a place much warmer than this.

His slitted eyes were bloodshot and unblinking. One of his tusks had a huge cavity that surrounded his lip. The lip looked puffy too.

When the wind rushed through, the man’s clothes clung to his bones without warming him.

MMmmm… growled the darkness.

The wind gushed, hhhHHH!

Akha’s rage passed, like a storm passes.

He shivered. They all did, even Gran. And Nala realized that she felt afraid too, and that she hadn’t felt afraid before.

Nala felt the red wind rush down the mountain.

A flash of… something.

A blink of (HHH) him.

Another HHHhunt, this time the HHHUNTED, this time—

Then, gone. She made it gone. No, she said, and felt protected.

Nala blinked awake. Gran’s magic was gone. All magic was gone, except the little voice in Nala’s belly, the bare-finger-tickle of the shadow goddess sleeping in her spine.

Not yet, the voice said to Nala. And only her. No one else could hear it, or at least no one showed they could.

“Come on,” said Gran, terse. “Let’s get to town; come on. Come, Nala.”

As they went, Nala heard a woman crying, and a couple kids gossip in some Southern Orcish accent.

“Just like he said.”

“Shut up!” the other hissed.

“The demon!” hissed the first, as Nala passed, not looking. “Ten thousand years they said! Well that time’s nearly up!”

“Says who?”

“Says my da’.”

“Yea? And where is he?”

That shut the both of them up, and Nala and Gran Akha went on.

* * * * / * * * *

The path through the tents was nearly third-a-league. The full moon was risen as Nala and Gran finally got to East Gate.

As they got closer and closer to town, the atmosphere became lighter and lighter. Various towns and homesteads from leagues and leagues away gathered here, though for local there must have been 27 refugees. Nala felt crowded and claustrophobic.

“Shouldn’t we just try the Southgate?” Nala said. It was getting noisy, and the crowd was getting thick.

“Too late!” Gran said, clearly also frustrated.

“At least it’ll be busy!” Nala offered. “Lots of people gonna be at your Telling!”

“Not helping!” Gran said. She had to shout that last part.

Everyone came to Orcshire at Grainwitch time. From the furthest Northern foothills to the horselords in the south, every family seemed to be at every gathering in the valley. It was like that every year, but this was an order of magnitude more crowded than anything Nala had ever imagined.

The celebration was inside the town, though. Outside the moat, the refugee camp was not festive. The gate’s entrance was crowded by tents, surrounded.

Gaunt faces peppered the night, and their eyes haunted her. One face in particular. The stranger stared into some middle distances, some no-place, his jaw slack, his lips dry. There but not there.

Then he noticed Nala staring at him, and she looked away, embarrassed that she had let herself be so rude. She kept her head down as they walked ahead.

The smell was a lot, too. Even the smells of the camp and the smells of market on a festival night competed. It made Nala’s eyes water.

The smells overlapped, like her worst true dreams did.

Those dreams were ones where yesterday’s horrors overlapped with tomorrow’s worst fears, and that’s kind of what this new level of overstimulation was like. Smells and sounds and sights and strangers crowded around her in every direction.

Sweat and smoke and sick infants. The sound of an angry child, and the empty face of his distant-minded mother.

Seared meat and soiled water.

Honey mead and Grish’s lamb stand (though tonight, his grill was full of pork and a perfectly salted slab of beef; rare delights for this festival night).

But now they were at the gate, and they were crossing in. They were crossing in from the open, rural valley into the claustrophobic din of the town on a festival night. The town was swollen with locals and refugees.

Hhhh, hissed the wind, whistling through the wooden town fence. Musicians competed for attention, one on every corner, each singing as loud as they could for fear of obscurity.

* * * * / * * * *

AUTHOR’S NOTE— Thank you so much for reading! Here is the next Chapter, which is all about Orcshire on a Festival night! Think jugglers, a crowd, and grilled meat…

Orcs & Crafts.