The race we know as orcs are thought to have told this story of the origins of
the various races.

'Back at the very, very beginning, before the stars had been kindled,
Melkor, the font of all evil, created the orcs in the Pits of Utumno- squat, toothsome,
bow-legged, cruel and capricious, they multiplied and violated the young world with pillage,
devastation and boundless enthusiasm.

And it was bloody good.

But the jealous Ilúvatar, envious of the orcish races' shambling gait, simian profile and
impressive dentistry, captured some of the first orcs and perverted them. He exposed them
to high culture, fine foods, classical music, art, literature and the twisted ideologies of
kindness, charity and chivalry. And slowly, slowly - he sissified them.

So were born the race of elves.'

The educated reader will notice immediately that the orcs have gotten things rather the
wrong way round. Unfortunately any attempts to inform the orcs that they were mistaken
tended to fail, though many fine ethno-biologists died in the attempt. It is fitting here to
remember the last words of the great missionary-scholar Eldoran:

'Ye may rip off my head as ye please, forsooth, but first let me just say that this creation


story of yours is utter -'

Lest we forget.

But first, a Warning to Readers, especially the Weak-Willed - HERE BE (SOME) SPOILERS!

The following events are set in the background - the extreme background - of the
events forming Chapters V to X of Book Five in the final book of a certain massively popular
fantasy trilogy. While every effort has been made to obscure the plot details, a certain
amount of spoilage has been unavoidable in two or three areas. Anyone who has not read the
book in question, and intends to, is gently advised not to read this. Or you could wait for
some kind of screen interpretation, possibly coming out in the near future.

So, as the saying goes, if you don't want to know the score, look away now.

' … the Events here recounted, while Outlandish, yet are True, and are the result of much
Study and Seeking after the Cause of Things … their Meaning, perhaps, should not be
Pondered too Deeply, as it is not an Edifying Tale … I humbly submit this account now merely


as an Curious Footnote to my Histories (and a Reminder to Eternal Vigilance against the
Designs of Cunning, Swiven little Con-Artists)(crossed out); make of it what you
will.'

- Extract from unpublished notes of the Royal Historian.

Ideally, the process of justice should be swift and fair. But the sickly-sweet smell and
swarms of flies in the air of this courtroom suggested that the authorities had decided to
economise on one of these.

'…and so I find you guilty an' sentence you to have your head cut off until you are dead,
dead, dead,' droned the officer-orc, hammering the table with his gavel.

'But I-' The private got no further. A professional blow from the executioner removed his


head, sending it spinning like a horrified coconut across the room, where it thumped against
the wall and joined the mounting pile. The limp body was dragged out of the room.

'Next!'

The prisoner was hustled in, weighed down in shackles and chains, and stood glaring
malignantly at the floor with the air of one who has a chip the size of a small planet on his
shoulder.

'Scum…' began the officer lazily, reading from a leaf of paper. 'You are here under court
martial on the charge of cowardice, it bein' established that, on the twentieth of October of
this year you did refuse to take arms in defence of the fortress of Khalid-Baras, that you
used offensive terms to an officer, and furthermore yadda yadda yadda,
let's-just-skip-that-bit…' He flipped the paper over.

'So how do you plead private, ummm…' A fat finger ran down the list. '…Lurkh. Also known


as 'Lurkh the Moderately Vicious'. How do you plead, private?' The orc smiled, a yellow
smirk growing on his face like mould on bread. 'If you want my advice, you'll…'

The defendant muttered something. One of the guards refrained from examining his nose
for a moment, and looked puzzled.

'He says not guilty, guv. By reason of his bein'…' The brow creased. '…a
conchy…enchuss…somethin'.'

'Object,' offered the second guard. 'A conscientious object. That was it.'

'And what does that mean?' snarled the officer, seeing his record for speediest justice
dispensed disappearing over the horizon. Again, the prisoner muttered.

'He says…' The guard scratched under his iron helm. '…he says he don't believe in
violence.'

The officer twirled the gavel between his claws, and regarded the blood-soaked walls and
gory cairn of heads. If this didn't convince the scrawny scag, what would?

'What d'you mean by that, eh? How can you not believe in violence?'

This time the muttering went on for quite some time. The guard took off his helm, and
wiped the sweat from his scalp, then cleared his throat.

'He says…' The guard's lips moved silently for a moment, and he took a deep breath.

'Yes? Come on, you ninny…'

'He says that 'is non-belief in violence just represents 'is own persn'l phil-osophy, an'
doesn't involve a denial of the mater-ial facts, but simply re-flects 'is belief that there're
peaceful s'lutions to nearly all the problems o' the world, should we only look for 'em, which
we don't… that fiscal force should be used only as a last resort, that two wrongs don't make
a right an' that if we were all just a little more conchy-enchuss we wouldn't hafta go around
choppin' off heads all the time…'.

The guard, having turned a dark shade of green, took another deep breath, and sat
down.

The officer darted his fat tongue over dry lips. All those words…there must be powerful
magic in them somewhere. What did they all mean? Where had they all come from? Would he
get in trouble if he didn't know what they all meant? Why was the prisoner staring at him
like that and grinning? This kind of thing hadn't been covered in his briefing, they
just gave him the hammer and the chair and told him to keep the heads mounting up…

He fumbled the gavel and brought it down hard. Then he blurted out the most appropriate
way of shifting the problem along the line.

'Gate duty. Send him to the gates. There to be employed while we, umm, review his case.
Send him now!' The executioner cocked his head, and let the crusted axe droop.

As he was being led out, the prisoner shot him an ironic salute, and he growled.

'Next!'

This looked more promising. A shaking little runt, still wet behind his pointy ears. Too
petrified to speak. The officer-orc leaned forward kindly.

'Nervous, are we son?'

A quick nod, eyes averted.

'Well, never fret, private. We can dispense with the formalities.'

He crumpled up the paper, and nodded to the executioner. As the axe swung round, he felt
his good mood begin to return.¹

Day came, and weak sunlight washed fruitlessly over the lifeless ridges of the parched
mountains. With the first glimmer of day in the East, the cry of brazen-throated trumpets
was heard: from the grim watch towers they blared, and far away from hidden holds and
maggot-holes in the hills came faint answering calls; and further still, remote but deep and
ominous, there boomed in the hollow land beyond the dawn chorus of the mighty Dark Tower.
Another dreadful day of fear, toil and cruelty had come to the Land of Shadow; and the
night-guards were summoned to their deep dungeons and hard beds, and the day-guards,
evil-eyed and fell, were tramping to their posts. Steel gleamed dimly on the battlement.

The Black Gate was open for business, and its business was being closed. And so it
was.

Some of the sentries looked around wearily upon hearing the distant stream of curses
coming up the stairwell. This was a daily ritual. The raised voices were accompanied by a
strange metallic scraping echoing up the stone tube, as though someone was attempting to
manoeuvre a seven-foot sharp object up a narrow passage, and making a mess of it. Which, of
course, they were.

Finally there emerged from the stairwell what would have been a cruelly barbed halberd
tip, had it been sharpened in the past century. It was followed by a six-foot shaft and,
finally, by an orc. Examine him: skinny, bow-legged, with a flat, cruel, deeply-lined face,
prominent fangs and an offensively poor posture. He looked evil-eyed and fell, certainly, but
that's just genetics. What he felt was hung-over and ill.

Lurkh winced and shaded his bloodshot eyes as he emerged from under the arch into the
bright morning. His head felt like a rancid eggshell, if rancid eggshells could throb with pain.
His dicky stomach was playing up too, not helped by having to inhale the morning breath of
six hundred soldiers in the cramped corridors. And it had taken supreme effort to drag that
pig-sticker all the way from barracks up the endless stairs…

Barely a second had passed before he was dealt a stinging blow to the head. The line
building up behind him was impatient, shuffling and shouting. Gate duty was for the misfits,
the troublemakers and the idiots, those who could barely be trusted to hold a spear the right
end up and not fall off the wall.

'Heya, you slug! Get to your post, get moving there.' Scagduf the overseer raised the butt
of his whip keenly. He had been practicing his casual sadism on straw dummies the night
before, and was eager to put his new skills into practice. 'Or I'll 'tan your mis-er-able hide'.


Yer.'

Hissing a curse between his fangs, Lurkh hefted the halberd and slouched off along the
vast complex of battlements, weaving to avoid the night-watch sentries who were coming
off-duty. Their raucous chatter seemed to enter his head and pour red-hot coals on his living
brain. At least, with a little luck, he could be asleep again in ten minutes. Quite early in his
career, Lurkh had mastered the art of sleeping on his feet while leaning on a spear, sometimes


for hours, while appearing to be scanning the horizon with malevolent watchfulness.

The only possible obstacle could be if his fellow sentry today was - he turned into the
buttress-port and gave a twisted smile. What were the odds? Life had p****d in his mess tin
yet again. His companion for the next fourteen hours half-turned with a grating of armour,
and gave a big, simple smile.

'Good mornin' Lurkh, and how're you today? Great view up here, isn't it? I know we see it
every day but it always just hits me, you know? And can you smell that air? Lovely. You
feeling alright, old pal? You look a bit peaky. I'd recommend some fresh air and a good
night's sleep…'

Lurkh leaned the halberd into the corner and turned his tired eyes to the specimen of
Ghurz, Private. Known in the barracks as 'that freakish b*****d', or 'Ghurz the Unsettlingly


Happy'. Orcs are not generally cheerful or gregarious creatures, inclining more towards
sullenness or malicious insanity. Out of the hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of orcs
Lurkh had met in his long life, Ghurz seemed to be the sole exception. His sunny, friendly
nature made his comrades fear and avoid him. Lurkh harboured dark doubts about his
parentage; he was too happy, too loud…

He gave a grunt in reply, which never seemed to discourage further conversation. 'I'm not
your 'old pal', you chirpy psycho…' he muttered under his breath. Insulting Ghurz was as
pointless as trying to knock down a wall with a rubber ball.

He sniffed the air, as instructed. At the moment, the dry wind was bringing a fetid stench
from the slag pits of the interior, charcoal, decaying flesh and sulphur. It was lovely, true,
but he was in no mood to enjoy the pleasures of the outdoors on this particular morning. For
one thing, he had a nasty suspicion that he was going to die very soon, and it wasn't just the
hangover.

'Could you keep it down a little? I have a bit of a stuffed-up head.'

'Oh, yeah, sure. Sorry.'

With other orcs this little exchange would have involved drawn knives, and threats to the
well-being of both parties, as well as insinuations about various disgusting personal habits.
But somehow Ghurz was different. He provoked…not fear, certainly, for he was notoriously
averse to inflicting pain on others. He had reduced the toughest drill sergeants to bitter
tears; with Ghurz' size and strength, he should have been in one of the special regiments, but
his blushing reluctance to commit acts of violence had kept him a private. Such a deeply
perverse character flaw would not do for an officer. It was not respect either, for it was
clear to anyone who talked to him that he was a gurgling idiot… He was just fundamentally
good-natured, which is a terrible thing for one orc to think about another, but Lurkh
thought it just the same. You didn't mess with a good-natured orc. There was no telling what
he might do.

And there he was off again, babbling happily about a fight he had seen last night, where a
bunch of grunts from E Company were jumped by some of their rivals from L Company, and
they had to call in a troll to break it up.

'There, see? Those are some of the guys.'

Lurkh squinted, and made out some tattered nightmares hanging from the gate arch far
below. Ravens and scraggy vultures flocked around the buffet, pecking and tearing. He had
some fellow feeling for the pathetic carrion on their hooks, but not much. 'Act out, and you
shall be gutted like a clam' was a lesson he had learned from a very young age, which had
enabled him to get past a very young age.

So he just grunted, leaned on the parapet and regarded the view. From up here, the land
spread to the marshes and the distant hills, and the brown horizon wavered in a heat haze.
Below the Black Gate, on the vast, dead plain, battalions wheeled and manoeuvred, drilled and
paraded. Occasionally the sun would glint off a distant spear or shield, lending a sense of
scale to the tiny figures. Beyond them, nothing.

Ghurz was fidgeting with his halberd, shifting from foot to foot, whistling absently and
picking at the rings on his vest, which he was too big for. Lurkh started a short
countdown.

'So, what do you think 'bout this war then?'

Ending his countdown, Lurkh stared into the middle distance.

'I know what way the wind is blowing…'

Orcs don't have eyebrows. If they did, Ghurz would have raised his.

'Huh?'

Lurkh turned and glared balefully at his companion.

'I think we're all going to die, my boy.'

'But - but the news from the front is good.' Ghurz was puzzled, and gave a grin of
mindless optimism. 'The eastern armies are advancing, the strongholds are, umm, holding
strong, I heard the other day we mightn't even be called up ourselves…. How can you be so
gloomy?'

'Historical precedent.'

Ghurz' mouth moved, framing the words but not comprehending them.

'It means that…umm…things go in cycles, right? So the same stuff happens again and again.


With me so far?'

'Mmm hmm.'

'And, hard as it is to accept, it seems that Good always triumphs over Evil. Which is us.'
He tapped the symbol of the red eye on his mail vest. Just explaining it was getting him
depressed again. 'If history has taught us anything, it's that all self-proclaimed Dark Lords
have a short life expectancy. The Boss will be overthrown, Lugbúrz will topple and the forces


of Good will prevail. The smug sods. And when the big man goes down, it's grunts like you and
me who'll break his fall.' He looked glumly at the stonework for a moment, before adding:
'It's happened before.'

Ghurz stared morosely at his talons for a minute, then brightened up.

'Nah, I'm sure you're wrong. 'Nothing But Victory For The Great Orcish
Hordes'², remember?' He glanced around, and went on
hesitantly. 'And…and if we do, um, lose…well, I'm sure the elves and humans and all will
understand that we were just following orders.'

He slapped the shaft of his halberd, and beamed out happily at the world in general, with
the air of someone who had solved all of its problems. His companion gave him a foul look.

'We're orcs. They hate us and if they could they'd wipe us out. And they will. Ever


hear of genocide? It means everything must go, and that means you…'

'But the Captain said…'

'Never mind what he said. All they do is lie to us anyway.'

'Well then, if there's no hope, what are you going to do, Mr. Gloomy?'

Private (2nd class) Lurkh of the 127th Battalion, V Company, regarded the brown horizon,
imagining beyond it great hordes of bright-eyed elves with sharp swords, grim men with long
spears, vicious dwarfs with huge axes… When he had first decided that defeat was inevitable,


almost a month ago, he had asked himself the same question. By now he had the answer.

By now he had the Plan.

And it was a good plan. Unfortunately - and here he glanced at Ghurz, who was busily
picking breakfast out of his incisors - it was a two-orc con. Of course, it would be
better this way, with someone simple he could control…still, he already had a
headache… After several seconds of internal debate, and with great reluctance, he cleared
his throat.

'Ghurz?' he said, cautiously, quietly.

'Yep?'

Lurkh suppressed a shudder. This sunny temperament, it was just creepy.

'In less than a month, I guarantee you, there will be an army before these gates, and - no,
shut up and listen - and they will throw down the Black Tower and turn the country into a
wasteland and put all of us poor creatures to the sword. I know this, alright? because
it's…it's the proper ending…no, forget that - I just know. Do you understand?'

Ghurz nodded mutely. You had to listen to Lurkh, he had studied and got an
education, and if no-one knew where, well, it was still an education, wasn't it? There
were all kinds of rumours about him, which he nearly always refused to confirm or deny. He
knew stuff, stuff no orc has any business knowing, like about foreign places and why to avoid
them, and he knew long words with '-us' at the end of them, and some really complicated
curses. Sometimes he'd get drunk and start spouting off about 'manifest destiny', 'historical
imperative' and 'narrative necessity', and would get depressed and they'd have to break a
chair over him to cheer him up. But you had to listen to the educated orc, even if you didn't
understand all the words. So Ghurz nodded.

'Alright. How would you like a way out?'

'A way out of what?'

Lurkh whistled between his fangs, exasperated.

'Not so loud. A way out of dying, you happy cretin. An escape plan...a retirement
plan, if you like. I refuse to just give up my life like a mug. I like living. So we
screw all this lot and save our own skins.'

'What…like deserting?' Ghurz was whispering now too, casting nervous glances at the
nearest overseer. The Dark Lord had many hugely creative ways of punishing deserters,
worse than the old 'length of hose-pipe and barbed wire' trick, more horrible even than the
famous 'wire waistcoat'.³

'Not deserting, no. Any clod can desert. What I'm talking about is new.'

Lurkh leaned in close, and there was a dark gleam in his eye as he hissed softly.

'We're going to defect.'

The dramatic effect was rather spoiled by Ghurz scratching his ear, and asking what that
meant. Lurkh told him, and watched his eyes widen as the full horror and treachery hit
him.

'You mean, go over to - to the other side? Betray the Homeland? Join the elves and humans


and all them? But you said…but they're…it's crazy, it's never been done, we'd be killed…'
Now Ghurz was terrified and confused, speaking fast and low, tripping over his words.

If he knew the whole truth, what would happen? Probably his tiny brain would pop and
dribble out of his ears in fear. Lurkh laid a reassuring hand on his throat, and shook him a
little till his goggling eyes met Lurkh's.

'It can be done. By me. And you. Now pull yourself together, you're blubbering
like a spawnling.'

Feeling distinctly un-orcish as he did it, Lurkh took a balled-up tissue from his pocket and
clamped it onto the hysterical sentry's nose.

'Blow,' he growled. Ghurz obliged.

'Feeling better?' he enquired grudgingly, surreptitiously dropping the tissue. It
splashed.

'Yuth.'

'And you trust me?'

A short pause.

'Yuth.'

'Oh good,' said Lurkh, and he drew his black dagger and stabbed Ghurz in the
stomach.

He felt a slight irritating pang of conscience as the wounded orc looked at him, hurt and
puzzled, before slumping down heavily against the low wall, clutching at his belly.

'Wha…?' he gurgled.

'Just play along, alright?' hissed Lurkh quickly. Then, turning to the other sentries who
were hurrying over, he threw down his bloody dagger and bellowed:

'Treacherous worm! Scum! Ooooh, hold me back lads…I wanna finish this traitor off!'

Ghurz groaned once, saw sticky black blood on his hands, then passed out. As darkness
washed over him, he dimly heard a harsh voice crying: 'The medics are coming!' Then his
thought fled far away and his eyes saw no more.

In the next chapter an explanation is offered, the Tower is reached, we
explore the dynamics of complex command structures and re-usable fuels and Ghurz gets
understandably tetchy.

The Final Appendix
Archive

Mr Legion

24.07.03 Front Page

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