CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

FARCHRIST TALES

BOOK THREE:

THE UNDERGOD

Near the end of Farchrist Year Eighty-Six, my mother gave birth to me in the small room where she slept in the back of The Quarter Pony. She had been working there for nearly eight months, saving her earnings so she would have enough money to care for her newborn son. When the fact of her pregnancy became apparent, some rumors circulated around town about Otis being the father. He denied these accusations out of hand, but in all other ways, he treated the expectant Amanda as if she was his responsibility. He cared for her, watched over what and how much she ate, and when the time for delivery was near, he hired a part-time replacement waitress while still continuing to pay Amanda her salary. Indeed, when the labor pains struck, it was Otis who ran to fetch the midwife. Two minutes after I was born, I was placed in the arms of my loving mother. Two minutes after that, Amanda allowed Otis to hold me.

+ + +

Smurch and Brisbane talked long into the night, long after the last of the orks had fallen asleep around the campfire outside the circus wagon. As they talked, they began to fashion the semblance of a friendship between them, each finding likable traits present in the other.

Smurch told Brisbane many things about the orkish clan he had found himself in the middle of, and Brisbane told Smurch much about himself and many of the rumors he had heard growing up about orks. When Smurch heard these rumors, he sometimes had to clamp both hands over his large mouth to stifle the laughs that erupted.

Smurch said this clan called themselves the Clan of the Red Eye, as could be seen by the decoration on their shields, after the reputed color of Gruumsh’s one eye. The structure of the clan’s society was very rigid, with clearly defined upper and lower classes. The lower class were those who lived on the surface, outside the cave, and it included all the women and children and most of the men. The upper class lived in the cave that bored into one of the Windcrest Hills. It included the Sumak, the Grumak, and their bodyguards and henchmen. The easiest way to tell a lower class ork from an upper class one was to listen to his name. The lower class all had one-syllable names, except for the women who had no names at all, and the upper class all had two-syllable names. The Sumak had a three-syllable name. Therefore, Vrak and Plog, which Smurch said was Floppy’s real name, were members of the lower class and Ternosh was a member of the upper. The Sumak at this time was an ork named Tornestor, who happened to be Ternosh’s brother.

Brisbane found it very unusual that the female orks had no names. He questioned Smurch about it, and the half-ork revealed that, to the grugan, a name was tied to one’s skill in combat. The orkish women were not warriors, so they deserved no names. The way it worked was that upon the age of maturity, sixteen, a young male could choose a one-syllable name for himself, usually starting it with the same letter of his father’s name, out of respect. If his skill in armed combat increased enough in the coming years, the Sumak could choose him to join his personal guard, or the upper class. The ork would then be allowed to choose a second syllable for his name. There were constant challenges of combat amongst members of the upper class and, through such a process, the ork could theoretically rise to the position of Sumak itself. The third syllable was then added and he reigned until he was struck down from below.

It was a very efficient system for keeping the best warriors in the ruling class and it had been done that way for centuries. As far as Smurch knew, there had never been a woman who had taken a name and tried to compete in the tests of combat, but there wasn’t any law he knew of that said one couldn’t. It just had never been done before.

The position of Grumak was handled a bit differently than the chain of command that led up to the clan chief. Smurch did not know as much about it, but about once in every generation, an ork would be born with the mark of Gruumsh One-Eye—red eyes. These orks were immediately taken in by the existing Grumak, to be trained in his ways, and were given two-syllable names. Smurch did not know how the Grumak’s powers worked, but he did know that when an elder Grumak died, and one of his apprentices had to take his place, the apprentice had to pluck out his own left eye to emulate the appearance of their orkish god. To his knowledge, no female ork had ever been born with red eyes.

Smurch affirmed for Brisbane that the powers of a Grumak were very real, and that if Ternosh had said he had cast an anti-magic spell on the circus wagon, Brisbane could just bet that was what had been done.

Brisbane reflected on all he had been told about orkish—or grugan, as Smurch had said—society. He could see some parallels in it with human society, especially in the class system, but it seemed brutal in the extreme. When the measure of a man was his skill in mortal combat, death had to be as commonplace as arguments. The self-mutilation of their religious leaders shocked Brisbane and he wondered what kind of god would demand such a sacrifice on behalf of himself. Although he had yet to see how the males treated their females, the fact that the women hadn’t even the right to a name did quite a bit to illustrate the conditions. And he had first-hand experience as to how the orks treated their prisoners and those, like Smurch, who were in the least bit different.

Smurch told him something else that night about orkish society and life in the Clan of the Red Eye, and perhaps this told Brisbane more about what he had gotten himself into than anything Smurch has said so far. At Brisbane’s urging, Smurch told him the orkish story of creation.

In the beginning, when the gods came to the earth to populate it with races of their creation, there were six of them. Grecolus was the god of the humans, Corellon Larethian the god of the elves, Moradin the god of the dwarves, Garl Glittergold the god of the gnomes, Yondalla the god of the halflings, and Gruumsh One-Eye the god of the grugan.

Brisbane had heard mention of all these races, but had almost no exposure to most of them. He had lived among humans all his life. Stargazer had elven blood in her veins, but he did not know if and where any full-blooded elves still lived. Shortwhiskers was the only dwarf he had ever gotten to know, although he had seen a few of them in his life, and there was a sizable dwarven nation living north of Farchrist Castle in the Crimson Mountains. Brisbane had never seen either a gnome or a halfling, but it was said they flourished in other parts of the world, and he was now being held captive by a clan of orks. Again, his teachings had taught him Grecolus had created all of these races along with the world, but apparently the other races disagreed with this belief.

These six gods gathered together and drew lots to see in which parts of the world their respective races would dwell. Grecolus drew the lot which allowed humans to dwell wherever they pleased, in any environment. Corellon Larethian drew the lot of green forests. Moradin drew the one for the high mountains, Garl Glittergold picked the lot for the rocky, sunlit hills, and Yondalla was left with the fields and meadows. Then the assembled gods turned to Gruumsh and they laughed, mocking him.

“All the lots are taken,” they taunted. “Where will your people dwell, One-Eye? There is no place left!”

There was silence upon the world then as Gruumsh One-Eye lifted his great iron spear and stretched it over the world. The shaft blotted out of the sun over a great part of the lands as he spoke, “No! You lie! You have rigged the drawing of the lots, hoping to cheat me and my followers. But One-Eye never sleeps. One-Eye sees all. There is a place for the grugan to dwell…here!” he bellowed, and his spear pierced the mountains, opening mighty rifts and chasms. “And here!” and the spearhead split the hills and made them shake and covered them in dust. “And here!” and the black spear gouged the meadows and made them bare.

“There!” roared He-Who-Watches triumphantly, and his voice carried to the ends of the world. “There is where the grugan shall dwell! There they will survive, and multiply, and grow stronger, and a day will come when they will cover the world, and they shall slay all of your collected peoples. The grugan shall inherit the world you sought to cheat me of!”

Brisbane listened carefully to the entire story and then repeated it to Smurch to make sure he had it right. Brisbane was privately shocked by the tale. Here was a mythology, an entire culture, based on vengeance and the promise of victory over life-long enemies. Brisbane had felt the current leaders of Grecolus’ religion had twisted it into something similar—the promise of victory over the enemies of your beliefs in the afterlife and the vindication that comes with knowing that although you suffered, you were right all along—but at least that sentiment was a human corruption and not the law set down by a god. It appeared, however, that orks had that law, set down by Gruumsh One-Eye himself at the beginning of time when he lost in the fixed game of the other deities, a law to wage unending war against those who wronged them in the name of their rightful place in society and in the name of their god.

Hate, murder, and revenge were the cardinal virtues of the orks and Brisbane realized he would have to somehow adapt to them or he was going to have a very short future indeed. He asked Smurch exactly what was going to happen to him tomorrow, just how Ternosh was going to test his magic powers, but Smurch could tell him nothing, being wholly unfamiliar with the ways of the Grumak. Brisbane did not like it, but it appeared he would have to wait and see.

When Smurch had talked himself out, Brisbane returned the favor and told the half-ork a little about himself, where he was from, and how he had gotten there. He told him about the friends he had been separated from and about the journey they had made into the Crimson Mountains. He told him about the temple they had found at the source of the Mystic and about the shrine located farther down the river. He told him about the mission to rescue Roundtower and the decision to do the same for Dantrius. He told him about Stargazer’s powers and the meeting of Ellahannah deep in the Shadowhorn. He told him about his life in Scalt and being raised by his mother and Otis.

There was a lot to tell, more than Brisbane had thought there would be. Smurch listened patiently to him as Brisbane had to the half-ork and, at times, even seemed engrossed. Brisbane tried to tell Smurch some of the ways in which the religion of Grecolus differed from that of Gruumsh One-Eye, but the half-ork did not seem interested in this information. What Smurch seemed really interested in was the experiences Brisbane had with magic.

Smurch’s experience and teaching both agreed that only the Grumak of a clan could have the gift of He-Who-Watches, the ability to work magic. Brisbane told him of another world entirely, a world in which anyone could have this gift, for in that world, it was not a gift at all. It was a talent everyone had, in varying degrees, that could be nurtured and tended until it bloomed into proliferation. Smurch said he found this hard to believe, but in all honesty, he could tell Brisbane thought it was true.

Brisbane was frankly amazed at how easily Smurch listened to his claims that differed so drastically from what the half-ork had been taught and believed. Brisbane was used to dealing with people who were bound to shout out blasphemy at the drop of a hat and run screaming away from alternative ideas. Brisbane supposed it was because of the multi-theistic universe that seemed to exist for all the other races except humans. To humans, there was only one true god, and belief, worship, and discussion of other gods was forbidden. To the orks, their god was only one of many, a number of an elite group that reigned in dominion over the world. There were other gods, and therefore other religions, and therefore other beliefs. Brisbane had noticed each race thought their god was the strongest of the group—just look at the humans, who made their god so powerful, no other deities could even share the universe with him. This loyalty was understandable to Brisbane, but he wondered where it would fall in the case of half-breeds. Stargazer was a half-elf and she worshipped the human god Grecolus. Smurch was a half-ork and he worshipped the orkish god Gruumsh One-Eye. But how did each of them make their decision? Being of two races, did they not have two gods?

Just who were these gods in which thousands put so much faith? Were they real beings, different from Brisbane and all powerful? Were they just ideals? Were they separate or were they all the same with different names?

Eventually, Brisbane and Smurch bedded down for the night amidst the dirty straw of the cage and the loud snores of the orks around the dying campfire. Before falling asleep, Brisbane felt the need to relieve his bladder, for the first time since he had been taken captive by the orks. He winced when he realized just how little liquid was passing through his system. He went over to the bars facing away from the sleeping orks, dropped his pants and pointed his spray out through the bars. The process hurt a little and that bothered him. It could mean all the abuse he had taken had not just been external. Something inside of him could be seriously damaged after the treatment Vrak had given his gut with his fist. Luckily, his urine was clear and free of blood, otherwise Brisbane might have sat up all night worrying, quaking at every tremor of discomfort he felt in his midsection. What he wouldn’t give to have Stargazer here to ply her craft on his injuries.

Brisbane shook his head.

As long as he was wishing, what he wouldn’t give to be where Stargazer was so she could ply her craft on his injuries.

Brisbane finished his job and pulled up his trousers. He turned around and saw Smurch laying quietly in the straw at his feet. He looked up and saw the sleeping forms of the orks around the remains of the campfire. Besides their snores, there was not a sound to be heard in the settlement. The cave mouth yawned blackly in the darkness and no one had come out of it since the sun had gone down.

Brisbane crept over to the door of his cage. The time had come. He was going to see just how much power this Ternosh had and how far he could run before his disappearance could be discovered. He reached the door and snaked one of his arms through the bars, reaching down in an attempt to grasp the padlock that secured the door. He found he could do it. He could hold the lock in his hand. If his magic opened it, he could reach down and take it off the door latch. He could get free.

But what of Ternosh’s anti-magic spell? The Grumak had said no magic would work in his cage, but how could that be? How could you prevent another person’s magic from working? In all he had learned from Roystnof, Brisbane could not recall any spell, power, or process that would make this possible. Of course, Roystnof’s magic was not all the magic there was, as Dantrius had illustrated. Ternosh could have this power even if Roystnof did not.

The only thing to do was to try it and if it worked, it worked, and if it didn’t, it didn’t. Brisbane’s mind did offer him one glimmer of hope on the subject. The lock was outside his cage, and maybe it would not be affected by the anti-magic. It was a slim hope to have, but perhaps it would be enough. Brisbane held his hand outside the wagon, twisted his fingers into the proper position, and began to concentrate on turning the tumblers in the lock.

“What are you doing?”

Brisbane’s concentration broke. He pulled his hand back inside the wagon and turned around to face Smurch. The half-ork was standing there in the darkness, his hands on his hips and his feet placed shoulder-width apart.

Brisbane was not sure what he should say. “Nothing,” he eventually decided on.

“What do you mean, nothing? You were doing something.”

Brisbane decided, that in their short time together, he had fashioned enough of a friendship with Smurch to be honest with him now. Besides, he couldn’t very well carry through with his plan now without Smurch figuring it out.

“I was trying to open the lock,” Brisbane said. “I’m getting out of here if I can.”

“Without the key?” Smurch said. “You’re not strong enough to break that lock with your bare hands. I doubt if anyone is.”

“I wasn’t going to break it open, Jack.”

“Well, then, what were you doing?”

“I was trying to spell it open,” Brisbane said. “I know a spell that will open it if Ternosh’s magic will allow it.” Brisbane was not sure how Smurch was going to react.

“It won’t,” Smurch said. “The Grumak has the power to do what he says. But please, don’t let that stop you. Go right ahead.”

Brisbane’s brow wrinkled. “What?”

“Go ahead,” Smurch said. “I’m not going to stop you. I must admit, part of me wants to see you do it. A human Grumak is something unheard of, and if you are genuine, you’re going to set the grugan world on its ear.”

“What if I open it, Jack?” Brisbane asked suddenly. “What if I do have some magic powers? What if I am a human Grumak and I do open this door?”

Smurch looked dumbly at Brisbane. “What if you do, Gil?”

“Will you raise some sort of alarm? Wake those orks up?”

Smurch smiled. “How could I do that if I’m sleeping?”

Brisbane smiled back. He turned again to the door, stretched his arm out the barred window, and began the simple little spell that would open the padlock.

Tumble, his mind commanded the tumblers and, helplessly, they did as they were told. Brisbane heard them click into place and the lock fell open. He picked it off the door and brought it inside with his arm. He turned around and held it up in front of Smurch.

“I did it,” Brisbane said, remembering to keep his voice low. “It worked, Jack.”

Smurch took the lock from Brisbane’s hand and examined it. “So it has, Gil. I can’t believe it even with the proof in my hands. You are a Grumak.”

“It was a simple spell, Jack. Roystnof, my friend and teacher, calls it a cantrip. My power is not that great.”

“Your power is very great indeed if it can overcome Ternosh’s magic,” Smurch said almost reverently. “The spell may have been minor, but your power cannot be.”

Brisbane did not want to argue the point. He wanted to get out of there. He extended a hand to Smurch and the half-ork numbly shook it.

“Glad we met, Jack, but I hope you understand when I say I never want to meet you again. At least not under these circumstances.”

Smurch looked at him oddly. “You’re going? You’re really a Grumak. You can’t leave. He-Who-Watches must have sent you here for a reason.”

Brisbane shook his head. “My power does not come from your god, Jack. I may be a sorcerer of sorts, but I am not a Grumak. I do not worship Gruumsh One-Eye.”

“But your power is real…” Smurch said, trailing off, obviously having trouble with the contradiction.

Brisbane cut to the heart of the matter. “Jack, I now have no time for this. Grumak or not, you promised not to raise a fuss if I escaped. Are you going to be true to your word?”

Smurch straightened up. “Grugan are men of their words, Gil. I now regret making the promise, but I will not break it.” He handed the lock back to Brisbane. “Here. Lock me in when you leave. It will add to the mystery.”

Brisbane took the lock. “Goodbye, Jack.”

“Farewell, Gil.”

Brisbane then went to the door and quietly pushed it open. He stepped out into the night, shut and relocked the door behind him, and began to creep away from the prison that had once held him. Brisbane knew he was far from free. He had the entire ork settlement to steal through unnoticed and, although it was a dark night, it would be foolish to think everyone was asleep and dreaming of vengeance against other races. He trotted along, low to the ground, and tried not to make any noise.

Soon he was entirely away from the circus wagons and the cluster of orks sleeping by the cave mouth, and into the body of the settlement itself. The open ground seemed deserted and Brisbane hoped all the nameless ork women had all their noisy children inside the tents or the ramshackle buildings, sleeping quietly and nestled against their big breasts. One tiny insomniac or one questing for a drink of midnight water could spell death for him.

Things went well as he bounded as quickly as he dared across the scrubland. Brisbane began to believe he might be able to make it out when he remembered the Dogmaster and his animal he had met on his way into the camp. Surely the perimeter would be guarded at night, probably more so than it was during the day. Brisbane remembered the large kennel he had heard and seen and imagined all those trained dogs ready to chase him down and rip out his throat. One of them had already smelled him. One of them already knew his scent. He knew it was foolish to think he could outrun trained dogs, even if he got lucky and made it through the perimeter guards. If only he had some kind of weapon to protect himself. If only he had—

Brisbane stopped in his tracks just like the flow of his thoughts. A chill swept through him and rattled around in his vertebrae for as many as five full seconds. Just what in the hells did he think he was doing? Even if he could kill the Dogmasters and their dogs just by looking at them, he couldn’t escape from the encampment yet. If he did, he would be leaving Angelika behind.

The thought seemed utterly foreign to Brisbane and for a moment he questioned if it could possibly be his. But of course it was. It was in his own head. Angelika was the greatest weapon in the world and with her, Brisbane had already overcome impossible odds and defeated monstrous evil. What could he do without her? He had to go back. She had promised him they would have their revenge on these orks if he was just patient and strong, and here he was running out at the first opportunity like a coward. He had to go back and wait for his chance to reclaim her.

I have to go back. I have to go back for Angelika. What am I without her?

And so Brisbane turned and silently made his way back through the settlement to the circus wagon where he had been caged. His reasons for doing so made quite a bit of sense to him at the time, although they might seem strange to the uninformed observer. The truth of the matter, a truth Brisbane would not discover for quite some time, was not that Brisbane refused to leave Angelika, but that Angelika refused to let Brisbane leave her. That was the kind of power she had. Angelika always managed to stay in the hands of the best warrior in the area and, right now, that warrior was Gildegarde Brisbane III.

Brisbane arrived back at the door of the circus wagon, the decision to stay now firmly planted in his brain. He turned the tumblers of the padlock with his little spell, climbed back into the wagon, and locked himself in again.

Smurch scrambled out of the straw. “What’s going on?”

“I can’t leave, Jack,” Brisbane said. “They’ve still got my sword.”

“Your sword?” Smurch said. “You came back for your sword?”

Brisbane nodded. “I came back for my sword.”

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Hillbilly’s Elegy by J. D. Vance

Vance says this in his afterword.

I tried to lay my cards explicitly on the table in one of the later chapters of the book: I am a conservative, one who doubts that the 1960s approach to welfare had made it easier for our country’s poor children to achieve their dreams. But those of us on the Right are deluding ourselves if we fail to acknowledge that it did accomplish something else: it prevented a lot of suffering, and made it possible for people like Mamaw to access food and medicine when they were too poor, too old, or too sick to buy it themselves. This ain’t nothing. To me, the fundamental question of our domestic politics over the next generation is how to continue to protect our society’s less fortunate while simultaneously enabling advancement and mobility for everyone. We can easily create a welfare state that accepts the fact of a permanent American underclass, one where family dysfunction, childhood trauma, cultural segregation, and hopelessness coexist with some basic measure of subsistence. Or we can do something considerably more difficult: reject the notion of a permanent American underclass.

And to be fair to Vance, this is indeed the book that Hillbilly’s Elegy is -- an examination of the reality faced by the poor rural whites among whom Vance was raised.

But there is a larger problem with the book. It mostly avoids placing blame -- except when it comes to figuring out what to do next.

Let’s begin with “Mamaw.” This is Bonnie Vance, Vance’s grandmother, who more or less raised him instead of his drug-addicted mother, and Mamaw is an interesting set of contrasts in Vance’s narrative -- serving as a kind of marker for the shift in the cultural and political opinions of her class.

Political scientists have spent millions of words trying to explain how Appalachia and the South went from staunchly Democratic to staunchly Republican in less than a generation. Some blame race relations and the Democratic Party’s embrace of the civil rights movement. Others cite religious faith and the hold that social conservatism has on evangelicals in that region. A big part of the explanation lies in the fact that many in the white working class saw precisely what I did, working at Dillman’s. As far back to the 1970s, the white working class began to turn to Richard Nixon because of a perception that, as one man put it, government was “payin’ people who are on welfare today doin’ nothin’! They’re laughing at our society! And we’re all hardworkin’ people and we’re gettin’ laughed at for workin’ everyday!”

Interesting (to me, at least) is that the footnote on that last quote leads to Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland -- a much deeper dive into both the touchstones (real and manufactured) that brought about these changes. But Vance’s examination of Mamaw and her opinions has some distinct value beyond what Perlstein may have been able to convey.

At around this time, our neighbor -- one of Mamaw and Papaw’s oldest friends -- registered the house next to ours for Section 8. Section 8 is a government program that offers low-income residents a voucher to rent housing. Mamaw’s friend had little luck renting his property, but when he qualified his house for the Section 8 voucher, he virtually assured that would change. Mamaw saw it as a betrayal, ensuring that “bad” people would move into the neighborhood and drive down property values.

Despite our efforts to draw bright lines between the working and nonworking poor, Mamaw and I recognized that we shared a lot in common with those whom we thought gave our people a bad name. Those Section 8 recipients looked a lot like us. The matriarch of the first family to move in next door was born in Kentucky but moved north at a young age as her parents sought a better life. She’d gotten involved with a couple of men, each of whom had left her with a child but no support. She was nice, and so were her kids. But the drugs and the late-night fighting revealed troubles that too many hillbilly transplants knew too well. Confronted with such a realization of her own family’s struggle, Mamaw grew frustrated and angry.

This part seems key to me. Mamaw got angry -- not because the Section 8 recipient was unlike her, but because she was too much like her. And…

From that anger sprang Bonnie Vance the social policy expert: “She’s a lazy whore, but she wouldn’t be if she was forced to get a job”; “I hate those fuckers for giving these people the money to move into our neighborhood.” She’d rant against the people we’d see in the grocery store: “I can’t understand why people who’ve worked all their lives scrape by while these deadbeats buy liquor and cell phone coverage with our tax money.”

These views even seemed strange to Vance.

These were bizarre views for my bleeding-heart grandma. And if she blasted the government for doing too much one day, she’d blast it for going too little the next. The government, after all, was just helping poor people find a place to live, and my grandma loved the idea of anyone helping the poor. She had no philosophical objection to Section 8 vouchers. So the Democrat in her would resurface. She’d rant about the lack of jobs and wonder aloud whether that was why our neighbor couldn’t find a good man. In her more compassionate moments, Mamaw asked if it made any sense that our society could afford aircraft carriers but not drug treatment facilities -- like Mom’s -- for everyone. Sometimes she’d criticize the faceless rich, whom she saw as far too unwilling to carry their fair share of the social burden. Mamaw saw every ballot failure of the local school improvement tax (and there were many) as an indictment of our society’s failure to provide a quality education to kids like me.

Mamaw’s sentiments occupied wildly different parts of the political spectrum. Depending on her mood, Mamaw was a radical conservative or a European-style social Democrat. Because of this, I initially assumed that Mamaw was an unreformed simpleton and that as soon as she opened her mouth about policy or politics, I might as well close my ears. Yet I quickly realized that in Mamaw’s contradictions lay great wisdom. I had spent so long just surviving my world, but now that I had a little space to observe it, I began to see the world as Mamaw did. I was scared, confused, angry, and heartbroken. I’d blame large businesses for closing up shop and moving overseas, and then I’d wonder if I might have done the same thing. I’d curse our government for not helping enough, and then I’d wonder if, in its attempts to help, it actually made the problem worse.

Radical conservative or social Democrat. This seemingly illogical tension Vance saw in his Mamaw is the tension that pervades much of his work.

As a younger man he became somewhat obsessed with the bigger question behind it. Why?

I consumed books about social policy and the working poor. One book in particular, a study by the eminent sociologist William Julius Wilson called ‘The Truly Disadvantaged,’ struck a nerve. I was sixteen the first time I read it, and though I didn’t fully understand it all, I grasped the core thesis. As millions migrated north to factory jobs, the communities that sprouted up around those factories were vibrant but fragile: When the factories shut their doors, the people left behind were trapped in towns and cities that could no longer support such large populations with high-quality work. Those who could -- generally the well-educated, wealthy, or well connected -- left, leaving behind communities of poor people. These remaining folks were the “truly disadvantaged” -- unable to find good jobs on their own and surrounded by communities that offered little in the way of connections or social support.

Wilson’s book spoke to me. I wanted to write him a letter and tell him that he had described my home perfectly. That it resonated so personally is odd, however, because he wasn’t writing about the hillbilly transplants from Appalachia -- he was writing about black people in the inner cities. The same was true of Charles Murray’s seminal ‘Losing Ground,’ another book about black folks that could have been written about hillbillies -- which addressed the way our government encouraged social decay through the welfare state.

Though insightful, neither of these books fully answered the questions that plagued me: Why didn’t our neighbor leave that abusive man? Why did she spend her money on drugs? Why couldn’t she see that her behavior was destroying her daughter? Why were all of these things happening not just to our neighbor but to my mom? It would be years before I learned that no single book, or expert, or field could fully explain the problems of hillbillies in modern America. Our elegy is a sociological one, yes, but it is also about psychology and community and culture and faith.

These are the kind of passages that seem most impactful in Vance’s work. The ones where he begins to move away from the frames of blame that dominate so much of American life, where he begins to look at problems for what they are instead of who caused them (the bugbearish mention of ‘our government’ notwithstanding).

But in another way, Vance seems to be simply posing. He’s describing the people he knows and he’s examining the things that make them think the things they think, but he’s also not suggesting any kind of solution to their problems.

Significant percentages of white conservative voters -- about one-third -- believe Barack Obama is a Muslim. In one poll, 32 percent of conservatives said that they believed Obama was foreign-born and another 19 percent said they were unsure -- which means that a majority of white conservatives aren’t certain that Obama is even an American. I regularly hear from acquaintances or distant family members that Obama has ties to Islamic extremists, or is a traitor, or was born in some far-flung corner of the world.

Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the president. But the president feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor -- which, of course, he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up: His accent -- clean, perfect, neutral -- is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they’re frightening; he has made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right -- adversity familiar to many of us -- but that was long before any of us knew him.

President Obama came on the scene right as so many people in my community began to believe that the modern American meritocracy was not built for them. We know we’re not doing well. We see it every day: in the obituaries for teenage kids that conspicuously omit the cause of death (reading between the lines: overdose), in the deadbeats we watch our daughters waste their time with. Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it -- not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right.

Insecurity and jealousy. Like Mamaw, Vance here (I think) accurately describes the malaise that threatens so many Americans and what they perceive as their way of life. 

But how do we fix this problem? Do we educate? Do we subsidize? Do we empower? Sadly, Hillbilly’s Elegy contains no prescriptions. It is only a kind of diagnosis.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton by Jane Smiley

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date. 

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One of those book-of-the-month club selections that I just got without knowing what it was about or who Jane Smiley was. I enjoyed it. It’s set in the 1850s and tells the story of Lydia Harkness Newton, a young woman who marries an abolitionist and moves to Kansas Territory just as the violence erupts there before the start of the Civil War. It does a very good job telling the story of that time from all points of view, including those of the slave holders:

Don’t you think that’s a terribly hard religion? I know it comes from that, but Papa said none of our family were Puritans like that, that the Puritans were hateful people, and even the Dutch couldn’t stand them, and so that’s why they had to go to the New World, not because they were persecuted, but because they were hateful. And I don’t think it’s fair that they should come to New England and that our people should come to Virginia, an utterly different sort of place, and that in the end, they should put their hatefulness and hard religion over on the rest of us, after all! And you know what? It was those very people that started the slave trade, just to get rich. They treated those slaves much more horribly on those ships than ever Papa or Mr. Harris would treat even a dog, even a rat! Papa said they used to have more slaves in Newport, Rhode Island, than anywhere else in the United States, until the Irishmen came in, and it was cheaper to pay the poor benighted Irishmen, who don’t know any better because of their religion, nothing and get rid of having to care for your slaves as a proper master does!

A lot of slave owners treated their slaves well and a lot of slaves, in the context of their bondage, were very well treated. In Smiley’s exploration, it becomes clear that it is not slave owners who are evil, but slavery itself, as a slave under the kindest keeper is still a prisoner who will seek escape, as the character of Lorna did, and, who, when caught, will be exposed to all the bestial delights of the “catchers,” a profession that draws the lowest sort of individuals, but a necessary one nonetheless.

Unlike a lot of characters in fiction, Lidie is someone I actually came to care about. When her husband and prize horse are killed by some Missouri border ruffians and she goes on a vengeance quest, disguising herself as a man and infiltrating the land of her enemies, it is a quest I actually want to see succeed. It doesn’t, of course. It wouldn’t be the novel it is if Lidie got to extract her vengeance from the men who wronged her.

I made up my mind that revenge was more complicated then I had thought it would be, but then so was everything else one looks forward to with confidence.

Lidie is a reflective soul, coming up with her share of aphorisms like this, but all well preserved within the flow of the narrative.

People in the west made a big house of words for themselves and then lived inside it, in a small room of deeds.

And:

But children can be very early taught, that their happiness, both now and hereafter, depends on the formation of habits of submission, self-denial, and benevolence.

This last is not from Lidie herself, but from a book she is familiar with -- A Treatise on Domestic Economy, for the Use of Young Ladies at Home by Miss Catherine E. Beecher -- which Lidie refers to throughout the novel and which provides a contextual quote at the beginning of each chapter. Thanks to a little Internet research, I know now that Catherine is the sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who put her sister’s talents for domestic economy to good use, by asking her to take over the housekeeping while she finished Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

FARCHRIST TALES

BOOK THREE:

THE UNDERGOD

The owner of The Quarter Pony was a middle-aged man by the name of Otis Parkinson and he hired my mother, Amanda, scant minutes after she entered the tavern. The job was that of a waitress, called serving wench in some circles, and came with a room in the back of the tavern, one meal a day, and a small salary. Some men in Otis’s place may have hired the young Amanda out of desire for her beauty, and then tried to abuse their position when she became dependent upon them. But not Otis Parkinson. He was a good man of Grecolus and hired her simply because she was in need and he needed the help. If someone had told him that day he would wind up married to the young girl, he would have laughed in their face. At that time, he did not know my mother was pregnant, he did not know her child would be a boy, and he did not know he would raise me as he would his own son.

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Night fell over the ork encampment slowly, oozing into the blue sky like molasses. Brisbane was free of his bonds but still a prisoner in the circus wagon. The party of orks had finally left him alone, losing interest in his inactivity and moving onto more stimulating pastimes.

Brisbane was thankful for their departure. He hated their eyes boring into him as they seemed to do, but this relief was lost among his infinity of worries. His hunger, his pain, his fear, they were old worries but they still packed a punch. The worst was that he could do nothing about any of them, and he had to take them in like unwanted visitors and try to make them comfortable. The orks were in control of him and he would not eat until they fed him, would not lose his pain until they stopped hurting him, and would not conquer his fear until he escaped them. He sat himself in one of the far corners of the wagon and tried not to give up hope.

Revenge, Angelika had promised. Revenge. But now even Angelika was gone, lost somewhere in the orkish cave and Brisbane wondered if he would ever wield her again. He tried to reach out to her mentally but he got no response. She was either unable or unwilling to speak to him. He wasn’t sure which one was worse.

He thought about Wizard, the strange ork in the strange clothes who had de-magicked his wagon. He thought about the things the ork had said. He was the only one Brisbane had heard use the common tongue, and Brisbane supposed it was a rare talent among orks. Wizard had really said very little to him, but what he had said left a lot of questions in his mind.

First of all, who or what was He-Who-Watches? Wizard had referred to his magic power as something granted by He-Who-Watches. A mark. There was only one explanation he could find that made any sense, but he distrusted it because it fell too easily in with the rumors he had heard about orks.

There were two schools of thought about orks. The first was that they were simple savage animals on two feet who killed because they liked the taste of blood. The second, and by far the more popular, was that they were simple savage animals on two feet created by Damaleous who killed to serve their lord and because they liked the taste of blood.

The question was, was He-Who-Watches Damaleous? Brisbane decided he very well could be. Even though he had come to discount most, if not all, of what he had been taught about Grecolus and his battles with the Evil One, Brisbane realized thousands believed it and, to thousands, it was a very real force in their lives. He did not begin to believe himself to be the ultimate judge between fact and fiction, but he knew the objective reality of fact often had little to do with the normal person’s subjective reality of fiction.

He considered Illzeezad Dantrius to be a prime example. Roystnof had taught Brisbane magic came from the individual, and Brisbane believed that, but Dantrius—and sometimes, it seemed, the rest of the world—believed magic came from Damaleous. Dantrius may be getting his powers from within, but he believed they were coming from below, and that was the only “fact” that mattered.

He could not help but wonder if the same story applied to these orks. From his words, it seemed Wizard believed his power and Brisbane’s potential power came from an entity called He-Who-Watches. Brisbane did not consider it too far of a stretch to imagine He-Who-Watches was just the orkish name for Damaleous. It was a different culture, they had a different language, and so they had different names for things. It was much like the time Brisbane had speculated about Shortwhiskers’ Moradin and Abbathor being the dwarven names for Grecolus and Damaleous. But if this was true for orks, and He-Who-Watches was what they called Damaleous, what did they call Grecolus? Did they even have a Grecolus-figure in their myths?

This tied into another debate he had once had with himself about the subjectivity of good and evil. Evil was good to the evil-minded. If the orks did worship a Damaleous-figure in the name of He-Who-Watches, wouldn’t that figure be their Grecolus-figure? It certainly might.

If all of this were true, which he still wasn’t sure it was, if orks could get magic powers from this He-Who-Watches, there seemed to be only one question of vital importance to his evolving philosophy. Was He-Who-Watches just the orkish name for Damaleous, or was he some other entity altogether? In essence, was the mythology he had been taught as a child the absolute truth, was it part of a larger whole, or was it a gigantic delusion?

The faithful worshippers of Grecolus considered theirs to be the only true god, all others were false gods based on ritual and superstition. The dwarves, and maybe the orks, had separate gods from those of humans and the other races, but they did not deny the presence of gods different from theirs. Roystnof, and a few like him, believed in a universe with no gods. It was very important to Brisbane to know which of these three ideas, if any, was the true one and, now that he was their prisoner, which idea the orks held.

He decided he simply did not know enough about the orks to gather any details about their mythology. He did feel, however, he could be sure Wizard believed his magic power came from a being called He-Who-Watches, whether that belief was realistic or not. As far as deciding the true nature of the universe, Brisbane didn’t think he would ever collect enough data to make a definite decision about that.

So he turned his thoughts to Wizard’s magic power. Regardless of its source, was it real? He could think of only one way to find out. He would test Wizard’s anti-magic spell by trying to cast a spell of his own.

He knew exactly which one he wanted to try. It wasn’t his only true spell, shocking grasp. That would be too obvious. It was one of the cantrips Roystnof had taught him early in his apprenticeship. Brisbane had been thinking about casting it since he had been tossed into his cage. In the middle of his sorrow, as he was pushed face first into the dirty straw on the floor of the cage, his ears had heard a sound that had brought a ray of sunshine into his cloudy hopes. It was a sound the orks may have thought would help break their prisoner’s spirit, but it had the opposite effect. It was the sound of Vrak’s key turning in the lock on the door of his cage.

A key meant the lock had tumblers, and tumblers Brisbane could turn much like the ones he had turned on Roystnof’s study door when he had cast his first cantrip almost six years ago.

But not now. There were still too many orks up and about. In fact, a number of the armored orks had built a campfire right outside his cage, before the cave entrance, and were eating their evening meal and drinking large amounts of what appeared to be ale. When they had all drunk themselves into unconsciousness, Brisbane would try his spell and, if it worked, he would slip out of the camp and run for it.

But right now, something much more pressing than freedom held his attention. Hunger. He sat dismally in his cage and watched the orks gorge themselves on freshly cooked rabbit meat and gallons of orkish ale. This evening meal seemed to be the only one the orks ate in a day, but they ate enough to make up for it. Brisbane had never eaten rabbit before, but right then, he thought he would have eaten one raw.

One of the orks around the fire Brisbane recognized as Floppy, but he acted as if he had never seen Brisbane before. They ate with reckless abandon and didn’t seem to care that there were people starving not thirty feet from where they sat.

He could hear the other prisoners in the other circus wagons begging and whining for food. He did not want to beg his captors for anything, but he felt if he was not fed soon, he would start uncontrollably. He listened to the moans of his fellows captives in misery. There were perhaps three or four of them and one of them was definitely female. The other voices were male, probably belonging to merchants who had traveled on the South Road between Scalt and Queensburg. In his mind, he saw all kinds of torture the orks could inflict on their prisoners, male and female alike. He thought about things females were especially susceptible to. What did these orks do to their female prisoners? Brisbane tried not to let his rumor-riddled imagination run away with him.

Why didn’t the King do something about these orks? The Windcrest Hills were part of the valley that made up the Farchrist Empire. These orks terrorized and captured honest merchants using the King’s roads to ply their trade, and kept them in cages to be tortured or eaten or worse. How could the King stand for that? Brisbane remembered the tax collector who had come to The Lazy Dragon in Queensburg had been accompanied by armed guards. Apparently, the King conducted his business under protection but did not care as much about other people’s business. Brisbane had never been a great student of politics, but he thought the least a system of government should do was protect its citizens from outside aggression.

He continued to watch the orks as they ate and drank, trying to block out the cries of the other humans as he was sure the orks were doing. He noticed the orks had a servant of sorts among them, someone to cook their meat and pour them fresh mugs of ale, and that this servant was not an ork. He was not a human, either. Brisbane wasn’t sure just what he was.

As he watched the servant move around in the firelight, Brisbane could see he was dressed in plain gray clothing that bore no sign or decoration of any kind. He appeared human in the way of arms and legs and the shape of his body, but his face was another story. His ears were long and sharply pointed, and at first Brisbane thought he might be an elf because of this, but he quickly realized no elf could be this ugly. The servant’s forehead was low and sloping, and his dark eyes were set deep beneath a prominent brow line. His nose was large and long, but pushed in at the end, as if it was trying to stay out of the way of the unruly teeth that pushed out of his large mouth. None of them were pointed like the stout tusks of the orks, but he seemed incapable of fully closing his lips over them. Brisbane thought he looked more like a handsome ork than an ugly human.

The servant was besieged with gruff orders from the other orks and he just about flew around the campfire to cater to all their wishes. When he had them all full of rabbit and their mugs full of ale, Floppy nodded to him and waved his arm in the direction of the circus wagons. The servant quickly picked up a sack and a water jug and made his way over to them.

Brisbane went right up to the bars and watched the servant go to the wagon at the other end of the line. He took a cup out of the sack and poured it full of water. Brisbane had his face pressed between two bars so he could see what was going on. He noticed the cries of the other prisoners had stopped.

The servant handed the cup of water through the bars to a pair of shaking human hands, and then drew from the sack some of the dried strips of preserved meat Brisbane had been fed on his journey with Vrak. These too he handed through the bars. The servant waited for a minute or two, took the empty cup back, and then moved down to the next cage.

They were being fed! Brisbane’s stomach nearly screamed in anticipation as he watched the servant make his way down the line. When he arrived in front of Brisbane’s wagon, Brisbane backed a step away from the bars and sat down in the dirty straw.

He met the servant’s eyes for a moment and then the servant bent over to pour him a cup of water. He handed it to Brisbane through the bars and Brisbane promptly drank half of it, forcing himself to stop so he would have some left to wash down his meat. He got four strips, a banquet compared to the two he had been fed the night before. He ate them quickly, he couldn’t help himself, and soon all he had left was the half cup of water. He quickly drained that and handed the cup back to the servant.

Brisbane wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Thank you,” he said, not caring if the servant could understand him or not.

The servant showed no reaction. He picked up the sack and the water jug and began to make his way back to the campfire.

Suddenly, one of the orks made a very loud comment and the rest of the orks let out an explosive burst of laughter. The servant froze in his tracks. The ork who had made the comment, Brisbane did not recognize him, rose to his feet and made another one. This time, some of those who laughed also got to their feet and began to make their way over to the servant. The servant dropped the sack and the water jug and began to back up towards Brisbane’s cage, slowly shaking his head.

One of the approaching orks was Floppy and when he and his comrades got to the servant, they seized him, still laughing, and began to drag him to the door of Brisbane’s cage. Floppy produced a key, either a duplicate or given to him by Vrak, and opened the padlock securing the door. In an instant, the servant was face down in the straw and the door had been relocked. Floppy and the orks went back to the campfire, still laughing.

The servant pulled himself out of the straw in front of Brisbane. Brisbane felt compelled to say something to the servant, but he still didn’t know if he would be understood. The servant sat up and tried to brush some of the straw off his clothes.

“Are you okay?” Brisbane asked.

The servant hung his head low. “Yeah, yeah,” he mumbled. “I’m just fine.”

There was an accent but it wasn’t as harsh as Wizard’s.

“What was that all about?”

Another curt comment from outside followed by another surge of brackish laughter.

“Keep your voice down,” the servant said.

Brisbane lowered his voice to a whisper. “Sorry.”

“It’s a running joke with them,” the servant said quietly. “Every time they get a new prisoner, they toss me in with him to see how strong the resemblance is. They think it’s hysterical that I look more human than grugan.”

“Groo-gan?” Brisbane said, pronouncing the strange word carefully. Except for their comparative size, Brisbane didn’t they think looked anything alike.

“Grugan,” the servant nodded. “Orks. That’s what they call themselves.”

Brisbane raised his eyebrows. It never occurred to him that orks would call themselves anything else but orks. He had thought ork was an orkish word, but evidently that was not the case. It was just what humans called them. He wondered where the word came from.

“Well,” Brisbane said, “you’re no ork. Or grugan. What are you?”

The servant did not seem offended by Brisbane’s comment. “I am half-grugan. My mother was human.”

Orks and humans could mate? The idea interested and repulsed Brisbane at the same time. None of the rumor-spreading humans would ever believe that. It was too twisted. To them it would be like humans and wild dogs producing offspring. Unnatural and, as too many of them would probably say, against the laws of Grecolus.

Strange. If orks could mate with humans, Brisbane figured they had to be just another race of men. Stargazer was a half-elf, after all, and no one turned their nose up to her. And although Brisbane had never known any, he supposed half-dwarves were possible. What about half-elf and half-dwarf? Half-elf and half-ork? There were any number of possibilities.

“How…” Brisbane said, not sure how to phrase the question he wanted to ask. “How did…”

The servant held up a hand to stop Brisbane’s sputtering. “My mother was captured on a raid long ago. Normally, she would have been used and killed, but my father, who was then the chief of the clan, took a liking to her and let her live long enough for her to give birth to me. While he lived, I was treated with some respect, but he has since been deposed, and now I am just their freakish whipping boy.”

Brisbane listened carefully to the servant’s story. When he finished, the servant looked at Brisbane very strangely.

“What’s the matter?” Brisbane asked.

“I just realized you’re the first prisoner who has ever tried to talk to me,” the servant said. “The others always screamed and cowered in one of the corners of the wagon. They thought I was some kind of monster.”

“How did you learn the common tongue?” Brisbane asked.

“My father was Sumak. All Sumaks can speak the common tongue.”

“Soo-mack?” Brisbane said.

The servant nodded. “Sumak. It’s the grugan word for clan chief.”

“What’s going to happen to me?” Brisbane asked.

The servant looked around. The orks around the campfire seemed to have forgotten about their joke.

“Scared, aren’t you?”

“A little,” Brisbane admitted.

“You should be,” the servant said. “They’ve never captured anyone like you before. They didn’t know your kind even existed. Ternosh thinks you’re a fake and if you are, you’re going to be in serious trouble.”

“Ternosh?”

“The one in the red robes who spoke to you before. He’s the clan’s Grumak.”

“Groo-mack,” Brisbane said, finally stumbling across a word he recognized. “That’s what Vrak said when he saw this pendant around my neck. What does it mean?”

“It doesn’t translate well into the common tongue of humans,” the servant said. “It’s sort of a sorcerer-priest.”

Sorcerer-priest? Yes, that would be hard to translate into the common tongue. A sorcerer and a priest were, in effect, opposites, one serving Damaleous and the other serving Grecolus, according to popular beliefs. It would be like trying to find one word to describe something that was both white and black, old and young, or dead and alive. Brisbane’s language couldn’t handle it. Only the ork

—grugan—

word, Grumak, conveyed the entire idea.

“They think I’m a Grumak?”

“Ternosh doesn’t,” the servant said. “But he’s not taking any chances until he can find out for sure. They’ve never heard of a human Grumak, but you bear the symbol of one around your neck. As I said, if you do turn out to be a fake, Ternosh is going to be very angry at your sacrilege.”

Brisbane felt as if he was just on the verge of understanding what the servant was talking about. Evidently, the only magic that existed in the clan was that used by Ternosh the Grumak. The pentacle he wore around his neck was a symbol of magic in this culture as well as in his. And it was considered sacrilege for anyone to bear the symbols of a Grumak if they were not a Grumak. That was all pretty clear. What Brisbane didn’t like was the servant’s use of the word sacrilege. It denoted the Grumak was not just a sorcerer but, as the servant’s rough translation had indicated, he was part of their religion. And Brisbane knew how angry some people could get when you poked fun of their religion.

“Who is He-Who-Watches?” Brisbane asked.

The servant’s head popped up as if he expected it to be cut off where it was. He looked over at the orks, but some of them seemed to be bedding down for the night. None of them seemed to notice or care about the hushed conversation going on in the circus wagon closest to the cave mouth.

The servant turned back to Brisbane and lowered his voice even more. “He-Who-Watches is a name for the god of the grugan. His real name is Gruumsh One-Eye, and it is from him that Ternosh receives his power as a Grumak.”

“Gruumsh One-Eye?” Brisbane said so softly he wondered if the servant would even hear him.

“Yes,” the servant said. “And if you are a fake, never let a member of this clan hear you speak his true name. They would kill you most slowly. It is forbidden.”

Brisbane’s thoughts had been correct. He-Who-Watches was a deity the orks believed blessed certain followers with the power of magic. But he still couldn’t be sure it wasn’t really Damaleous the orks worshipped. Right now, however, Brisbane wondered if he shouldn’t be less concerned with just who gave Ternosh his powers and more concerned with whether or not the orks were going to brand him a fake. He could do a few tricks, but he did not know if his power would be enough to save his life. It all depended upon how strong the orks perceived his power to be.

“Do you think I’m a fake?” Brisbane asked.

The servant shrugged his shoulders. “It’s not up to me to decide. I believe you could be a Grumak, but I tend to have a higher view of humans because of my heritage. The real test will come tomorrow.”

Brisbane was glad the servant was being so honest and open with him. There was plenty more he wanted to ask.

“What’s your name?” Brisbane said.

“Smurch.”

“Smurch? Is that your first or your last name?”

“Neither,” Smurch said. “It is my grugan name.”

“Do you have a human one?”

Smurch shook his head. “My mother was killed when I was very young. I know no human names.”

“Mine’s Gil,” Brisbane said. “Would you like one?”

“What would you suggest, Gil?”

Brisbane studied Smurch’s face for a moment. “Jack. You look like a Jack.”

“Jack Smurch,” the half-ork said, testing the air with it. “I like the way that sounds.”

Brisbane could not help but laugh a little.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Armageddon’s Children by Terry Brooks

So, quick story. Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara is the first book I remember reading. I mean, I obviously read other books before that, but The Sword of Shannara is the first book that grabbed me, that I can still remember characters from (Panamon Creel, anyone?), and that perhaps set me off on this literary journey that I’m still on. I’m going to guess that I was fifteen years old.

I remember reading The Elfstones of Shannara shortly thereafter, and I remember waiting anxiously for The Wishsong of Shannara to be published -- which came out in 1985, when I would have been seventeen years old. 

I also read a few of Brooks’s “Magic Kingdom of Landover” books -- definitely the first, and maybe The Black Unicorn and Wizard at Large as well. But that’s about it. For one reason or another, I fell out of the habit of reading Brooks -- probably when I fell away from fantasy novels in my mid-twenties.

One day I was reminiscing about all of this and I decided to check out what Brooks might have written since those days, and -- my word. He sure has been busy. Shannara, it seems, has turned into an entire literary universe, with many novels taking place both before and after the events of the original trilogy.

And then I thought, hey, wouldn’t it be fun to read all those books in “chronological” order? Not in their order of publication, but in the order of that universe’s own chronology -- including re-reading my beloved original trilogy somewhere in the middle.

So I went to the Internet and found the list -- Shannara books in chronological order -- and that told me to read the “Genesis of Shannara” series first, beginning with its first volume, Armageddon’s Children.

Except, Armageddon’s Children is not the first story in this long tale. As I read it I kept coming across references to an even earlier story -- implicit in references to characters like Nest Freemark and John Ross -- characters who don’t really feature in the “Genesis of Shannara” series, but who seem to preface it, to help construct the world in which Armageddon’s Children takes place.

And so, it was back to the Internet and the discovery of Brooks’s “The Word and the Void” series, which is a trilogy that predates the “Genesis of Shannara” series, and which begins, pretty much, in our present day world.

By this time, I was already deep into Armageddon’s Children, so I decided to finish reading it, but then to jump back to the first novel in “The Word and the Void” series, Running With the Demon, and properly start my chronological Shannara adventure there. 

I’ll blog about Running With the Demon soon, but as far as Armageddon’s Children is concerned, it was a relaxing read. Brooks’s prose was eerily familiar to me, and the care that he shows for his characters -- both the heroes and the villains -- was wonderfully present.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date. 

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A friend gave me this book and I found it a fairly good read. 

It’s about this man who is having an affair on his wife, who then finds out that his wife is having an affair on him and wants a divorce. His life begins to fall apart after that as we discover all kinds of hidden secrets about the lives of those around him. His wife’s lover is also having an affair with his own sister, and his wife and his girlfriend are both having affairs with his brother.

It’s a tangled and complicated tale, but it held my attention both because of the prose style and because throughout all the ups and downs the characters more or less maintain stilted and phony cordial relations with one another.

I took it to be a book at least partly about the need to maintain certain appearances in society, even when the dirty reality beneath it all is a whole other matter.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

FARCHRIST TALES

BOOK THREE:

THE UNDERGOD

Amanda took my father’s advice to leave the City Beneath the Castle. She left the very next day, after the body had been found and as the town began to buzz about the possible scandals and reasons for the death of one of their finest. She heard many rumors, some of which were shockingly close to the truth and others that could only have been made up by a madman. It was a warm sunny day when my mother fled from the city of her birth to seek anonymity in one of the smaller hamlets of the Farchrist Empire. She took everything she could pack onto one stubborn mule she had bought from a family friend for three silver pieces and headed out on the North Road. She spent a night in Ladysmith, but decided it was too close to home, and moved on the next day on the East Road. The next town was a small one called Scalt and, as she rode through it, she saw a sign in the window of a small tavern. She tied her mule to the hitching post, took down the sign, and went into The Quarter Pony to start a new life.

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Brisbane was kicked awake by Snaggletooth a few minutes after dawn. The ork grumbled at him and roughly helped him to his feet. The night on the ground had left him even more stiff and sore, and he could still feel the tautness in his face that could only be swelling. The orks had either already eaten breakfast or had skipped that meal because they were all packed and ready to continue on their journey. Within thirty seconds of being kicked awake, Brisbane was back in his position in the line-up, fighting with the rope that connected his feet to match the tireless pace of the orks. He did not remember the dream he had the night before.

He was miserable in the early morning sun. He felt terrible, his entire body one massive ache with small regions of flaring pain, one in his stomach, another in his face, and the last in the small of his back, where Snaggletooth had delivered a particularly swift kick. His hands had gone numb again and his twisted shoulders were beginning to develop a numbness of their own. He felt like he was choking on his gag and the rag in his mouth had lost all of its moisture during the night. It now tasted like dust.

But his physical misery was nothing compared to his mental anguish. Brisbane simply did not see how he was going to survive another day of the forced march. His hunger had returned with the morning, but unlike the sunrise, it seemed larger than it had been the day before. Knowing the orks, he could expect no food until they camped again for another night, and his stomach complained loudly that was much too far away. The hunger left him strapped of all his energy, and he wondered how much longer he would be able to shamble along like a zombie freshly returned from the grave.

For the first time he found himself wondering why he hadn’t just died when he plunged over the falls above the lost temple of Grecolus. The thought entered his head for the first time and it was quickly followed by the angry, and yet somehow still pacifying, voice of Angelika.

—No! Do not entertain such thoughts, Brisbane. You and I are destined for better things.—

He raised his head and fixed his reddened eyes on his sword, still being carried in the eternal clutches of Snaggletooth.

Angelika, he thought. I just don’t know how much farther I can go.

—There’s not much farther to go, Brisbane. Our journey will end today.—

It will? How much farther is it? How do you know?

—I know.—

It helped Brisbane a little. Today. If he could stay up just for today. Sometime today the hell would end. It was enough to keep his mind pushing his body ever onward. It did not ease his pain like, say, a healthy rub of Stargazer’s healing ointment—oh dear Grecolus, do you remember that stuff, it was in your former life, you spread some on Roystnof’s back after the attack of the ogres and the bruises faded a little right before your very eyes, do you remember that, Gil, can you remember that—might have, but it allowed him to endure the pain for a little while longer. He did not concern himself with where he was going to be and what was going to happen to him when he got there. He didn’t care. He only knew that before he had been lost in an eternity of one foot in front of the other, and now, there was the promise that this eternity wasn’t an eternity after all. It was just a long time. He knew because Angelika had told him so.

And so he was able to push on. He drove his body to the point of exhaustion, and then he drove it a little farther. He had to stay up just for today. Today this madness would end.

Snaggletooth and the other orks did not notice any superhuman effort coming from their prisoner. They knew where they were going and how long it would take to get there. The human was just extra baggage. They were glad he had given them as little trouble as he had. They were only concerned about getting home, and when they got there, the big human with the star around his neck would no longer be their responsibility. For them, it would be feast, drink, and old stories around a hot fire.

Brisbane did not care how she knew it, but Angelika had been right. His forced march ended that day. It was in the afternoon, far past noon but still early enough not to be troubled with finding a place to camp for the night. The sounds of bustle and activity could be heard from a long way off, but Brisbane was walking in a stupor of deaf ears, and he had no idea they were approaching the orkish settlement until he was brought to a halt by the ork holding onto his dead arms.

He looked up. He saw Snaggletooth had stopped and he was talking to an ork he had never seen before. This new one was also dressed in a mismatched set of black armor and he carried a shield with a large red eye painted upon it. He had a sword belted at his side and in his free hand was the leash of a dog, the breed of which Brisbane had never seen before.

It was a large animal, about as high as the ork’s waist at the shoulder with fur speckled in black, gray, and white like the fine grains of sand on a beach. It had a short snout and tall ears. Its eyes were bright orange and its teeth glistened white, wet with spittle. The dog was sitting at attention beside its ork master, growling deep in its throat.

Snaggletooth and the Dogmaster were exchanging what sounded like pleasantries in their brackish language. Brisbane wasn’t really paying attention to the sounds of their speech, but he seemed somehow attuned to the word groo-mack and, at its mention, he saw the Dogmaster begin to look him over suspiciously.

Snaggletooth then held Angelika up for the Dogmaster’s examination but he did not give the weapon to the ork. Talking all the while, Snaggletooth pointed out the large emerald in the base of Angelika’s pommel and then tried unsuccessfully to draw her from her scabbard. From a forgotten place deep inside of him, Brisbane’s wrath began to build at the sight of the ork handling the sword, but Angelika’s voice quickly echoed in his brain and calmed the tremors.

Snaggletooth and the Dogmaster talked for a little while longer and then the Dogmaster walked his dog down the length of their line, stopping beside each person to let the dog sniff them over. The dog approached Brisbane first, still growling low in its throat. Under other circumstances, he might have been embarrassed when the dog came up to him and sniffed at his crotch, but in his present condition, he just added it to the list of his personal tragedies since he had left his friends. Some of the orks laughed when the Dogmaster had to forcefully pull the animal away from Brisbane.

The other orks extended their hands before the dog got close enough to invade their private areas. The dog reacted favorably to each of the orks and, after the initial sniffing had been taken care of, each ork gave the dog a friendly pat on the head. The Dogmaster then returned to the head of the line and Snaggletooth slapped him on the back, barking out what could only have been a warm goodbye. Brisbane was shoved forward again.

The party continued over the rise of another hill and Brisbane thought about what he had just experienced. It had obviously been some sort of checkpoint, to control the flow in and out of wherever it was they were going. That was interesting in itself, that the orks would be organized enough to post and maintain such a patrol. It was the kind of thing that required strong leadership to work properly. It was the kind of thing one would expect to find around a fortification like Farchrist Castle, but it was a bit remarkable to find it out here in the wastes of the Windcrest Hills among a group of orks. But what really caught his attention was the dog, and more directly, the Dogmaster.

The domestication of animals was something Brisbane was sure most people would have put past the ability of an ork. Most people thought of orks as little more than animals themselves. But the Dogmaster had definite control over his animal. He remembered the way the dog had sat, seemingly at attention, while its master chatted with Snaggletooth about him and Angelika. That dog had not just been domesticated; it had been trained, probably to do much more than to sniff at the genitals of strangers. At every turn, Brisbane was seeing that these orks were much more than most people thought they were. He decided most people were full of shit.

The small group topped the hill they were climbing and started down its other side. Brisbane saw ahead of him, sprawled in a short valley amidst a high group of rocky hills, the large extent of the ork settlement.

It seemed to have little organization. There were a few ramshackle buildings scattered over the village, the most notable being what was obviously a kennel of some sort, giving its function away by the barks of dozens of fenced-in dogs. Figures moved randomly around the settlement, concentrated the thickest around the buildings. The settlement seemed to grow more dense as it neared the sheer side of the hill on the opposite side of the compound. The hill appeared to have been cut off by some mechanical means and a large cave mouth had been dug into it. Periodically, figures moved in and out of this cave mouth, and he could only assume the orks had some sort of underground complex in there.

As he was marched down the hill and into the settlement itself, Brisbane lost sight of his overview of the area and began to see more and more detail. Most of the orks moving about were dressed in ordinary, if dirty, clothing, but a few among their ranks wore the typical set of black ork armor. Of those in regular clothes, females were by far more numerous than males. They looked a lot like their male counterparts, big and solidly built, having snouts and tusks smaller than those of the males and less hair around their faces and necks. But they were most easily distinguished from the males by the large pair of breasts each of them seemed to have, pushing out the fabric of their dirty tunics. As Brisbane looked around, he did not see a single female with anything near to what would be considered normal for a human female. Some were almost freakish in their proportions.

Nearly all the females were engaged in some kind of handiwork. Mending clothes, preserving meat, or cleaning weapons, they all seemed to have some task to perform. Each of them also seemed to have a small litter of orkish children dancing around them, making a good deal of noise and doing their best to turn the attention of the females away from their work. As Brisbane was led through the settlement, the children paused in their activities to watch him walk by, their eyes wide with avid interest, only to lapse back into their foolishness after Brisbane had passed.

He also saw a number of small tents scattered between the few buildings. Their front flaps were open but he saw almost no one sitting inside any of them. The day was warm, and Brisbane figured they would stay empty until nightfall, when it would be necessary to put all the unruly children to bed.

His impression of the settlement as a whole was one of order amidst chaos. Out here in the wilderness the orks had obviously carried on a productive society for some time. There seemed to be no logic in the layout of the area—buildings, tents, and people scattered any which way—but in the actions of the men and women he had witnessed so far, Brisbane could see each ork had a job to do in their society and each ork did that job well.

These perceptions did not rattle off in his head like a lecture in sociology, he was in much too much physical distress for that. But the inklings of them were there, tugging away at the fringes of his conscious thoughts, reinforcing his idea that these orks were much more than anyone had given them credit for being.

After marching Brisbane through the center of the village, Snaggletooth stopped him when they arrived within a hundred feet of the cave mouth Brisbane had seen from the distance. There were many more armored orks in this area, all of them male and all of them carrying shields with the red eye symbol. Lined up next to the cave mouth, radiating out away from the small cliff face, were a row of structures that, from the distance, Brisbane had thought were just another group of run-down buildings. They were not. They were familiar for he had seen such things dozens of times in his life, but they seemed out of place here in the ork settlement. They were circus wagons.

There were five of them, lined up like a train, the hitchings for a team of horses laying uselessly on the ground and extending under the raised floor of each one’s neighbor. They were not the happy, colorful models, the ones used to transport the circus people from town to town in relative comfort. They were instead the ones used to transport dangerous animals, constructed of heavy wood with two walls of thick iron bars to cage the animal apart from innocent onlookers. They were not derelicts. They were being used by the orks to cage animals, and those animals were human beings.

Brisbane suddenly began to fight against his bonds and his captors. The ork who had control of him from behind, Brisbane thought it was Floppy, held firmly onto him and cruelly twisted his arms, forcing him toward the circus wagon closest to the cave mouth. Had Brisbane been rested and healthy, he might have been able to wrench himself free from Floppy’s grasp, but in his weakened condition, it was no contest. He was pushed steadily and painfully forward.

Snaggletooth took a key off a hook driven into the wood of the wagon and opened the padlocked door on its front. There was a small window in this door, guarded by small iron bars, which must have once been used by the circus masters to look in on their animals. When Snaggletooth had the door open, Floppy wrestled Brisbane up a step or two and drove him into the circus wagon.

The floor was covered with dirty straw and he stumbled face first into it. Before he could rise to his feet, Brisbane heard the door shut behind him and the locking of the padlock. Snaggletooth came around to the side of the wagon and he waved the key mockingly in front of Brisbane’s swollen face. The ork then clipped it to a ring at his belt and then, with Floppy and Half-Pint and the other two orks in his charge, disappeared into the cave mouth.

The other orks in black armor who stood around the area each looked Brisbane over for a while, but they kept their distance and did not pester him. They muttered amongst themselves, but their voices were low and, even if he could have understood their language, he would not have heard what they said. Brisbane tried to ignore them as he mentally went over his situation.

It did not look good. Here he was, hurt, tied, and gagged, locked in a circus wagon deep inside an ork encampment. He did not know where his friends were and he could expect no help from them. The only orks he knew by sight were the ones who had captured him, and they thought he was some kind of wizard. They had gone into the cave with his sword, surely to report to their superiors, and he did not know when they were coming back and who they would bring with them.

That was the down side. If there was any up side at all, Brisbane supposed it would be that he was still alive. The orks had beaten and starved him, but they had taken great pains to capture and bring him here alive. They obviously wanted something from him, and as long as Brisbane withheld it, he would retain his life if not his freedom. The problem was he did not know what the orks wanted.

His thoughts suddenly turned to those of the other people here in the orkish prison. He was alone in his wagon, but he had seen other humans in the other cars. He wished he could remove his gag so he could talk to them, so he could gain some kind of solace in the company of misery, but with his hands tied behind his back, it was impossible. Who were they? How had they been captured? What were the orks doing with them? Did the orks eat them as Shortwhiskers had said? Use them as slaves? Had any of them ever escaped? Could any of them help him? He had so many questions and so few answers.

Some of the orks still watched him, but they did not approach or try to communicate with him, and Brisbane soon found himself with little else to do besides wait. He tried to make himself comfortable in the dirty straw, but his injuries and hunger made it difficult. How did this ever happen to him? It seemed that one moment he had been standing in the hand of Grecolus, looking into the nest at the two eggs and the dead ork, and the next he was being tied up with Snaggletooth on his back. The attack of the bird-monster had been so swift he barely remembered it happening. Its dark shape had appeared like a vision, slammed into him, and knocked him from his perch in less than a second. The fall to the lake and over the falls was a wet smear on his memory, and somewhere along the way he had lost consciousness. It was terrifying to think his life could change so drastically in such a short period of time. It was as if he had no choice at all.

Brisbane did not know what was going to happen to him but Angelika had promised they would have their revenge on these orks if he would be patient and be strong. Well, he intended to do just that. In his position, Angelika’s promise was better than no promise at all, and Brisbane clung to it like a lifeline, a line to what his life had once been. If any part of it was up to him at all, he was going to get his old life back.

And so he sat there in the dirty straw, being patient and being strong, waiting for something to happen which he could control. He didn’t know how long he was going to have to wait in order to get his chance, but at that moment, he was ready to wait until the end of time.

Brisbane sat in his prison for about an hour before the orks took more than a passing notice of him. A group of the armored orks with the red eye shields began to gather in front of his wagon. They remained a respectable distance from him, but they were obviously waiting for something to happen.

That something was the re-emergence of Snaggletooth from the cave. The ork came striding out in the daylight—without Angelika, he left Angelika somewhere in that cave—followed by another ork whose appearance and dress were like nothing Brisbane had ever seen before. He was small for an ork, a little smaller than Half-Pint, and was dressed not in black armor or dirty rags, but in rich red robes. They flowed down the length of him with small sashes and belts of white to hold the many folds in place. He wore a small pointed cap between his two pig ears and his face and hair were immaculately clean. The ork wore a black patch over his left eye. Both the new ork and Snaggletooth came forward and stood directly in front of Brisbane’s cage.

The new ork, Brisbane being too shocked at his appearance to think up a name for him, studied Brisbane for many long minutes and then turned to Snaggletooth and muttered a few sentences to him. Snaggletooth nodded his head and slowly backed away from the new ork, stopping just before the gathered group of his black-armored comrades.

The new ork took a step closer to Brisbane’s wagon and planted his fists on his hips, pushing several folds of his robes away from his feet. He fixed his single eye on Brisbane’s face and, for the first time, Brisbane noticed the ork’s eye was red.

“Well now,” the ork said. “What do we have here? A wizard?”

It took Brisbane a moment to realize the ork had spoken in the common tongue, and not his orkish language. His teeth and lips gave the words a guttural accent, but they were understandable. Brisbane tried to say something to the ork but only mumbles could get past his gag.

The ork held up a placating hand. “No, no, please don’t try to say anything. You’ll just embarrass yourself. We know how to handle hostile prisoners, regardless of their personal powers.”

The ork had quite a command of the common tongue. No simple animal here. Brisbane saw his hopes of early escape slip down another notch. These orks were sharp.

“Personally,” the ork went on, “I don’t believe He-Who-Watches would grant the power to a member of a race as weak as yours, but as others have said, it is better to be safe than sorry.”

The ork then went silent and bowed his head. He raised his arms and began to growl in the back of his throat. At first, Brisbane could distinguish no difference between the growls of the ork and those of the dog they had met at the perimeter of the settlement. But as he listened more closely, he began to hear familiar tones and syllables in the ork’s low speech. It wasn’t common tongue and it didn’t sound like the orkish he had heard since his capture, and yet it was still familiar. It was—

With a shock Brisbane realized where he had heard some of the ork’s strange words before. He had heard Roystnof use them in his magical disciplines. The ork was casting a spell. Brisbane listened more carefully. He could only understand a fraction of the words, either due to his inexperience with magic or the ork’s harsh pronunciation.

But magic words were exacting. They had to be pronounced perfectly or they would not function. Indeed, the words Brisbane could understand were uttered correctly, so he had to assume the ork was using many words unfamiliar to him. It might even be a completely different kind of magic, like Roystnof had said Dantrius’ was. Brisbane began to get very nervous about just what may happen to him.

The ork was soon finished with his spell and he lowered his arms and raised his head. Brisbane looked at himself and his surroundings. He could discern no difference in him or them. The ork signaled to Snaggletooth and he came up to the front of Brisbane’s cage and drew his sharp knife.

“If you will turn around and slip your hands through the bars,” the robed ork said to Brisbane, “Vrak will now sever your bonds.”

Brisbane slowly did as he was told. Snaggletooth—Vrak, his real name is Vrak—slipped his knife between his wrists and, with one quick pull, cut the straps that had bound them together. Brisbane quickly moved away from the bars and began to massage his numb and swollen hands.

Vrak moved back to stand next to the robed ork, who Brisbane’s mind began to call Wizard.

“You may also remove your gag,” Wizard said to him. “It no longer matters. Any powers you might possess have been neutralized.”

Brisbane forced his aching fingers, rising from their comas with the flow of blood back into them, to undo the knot behind his head and he spat his gag out onto the floor.

“Wha—” he croaked, his voice failing him on his first attempt to use it. “What do you mean, neutralized?”

Some of the orks behind Wizard and Vrak seemed to shrink away from the scene and their mumbles grew louder.

Wizard looked at Brisbane as if he was an animal to be trained. “This is the first and last question I will answer for you. I have cast a spell over your cage so no magic will work there. If you really do have the mark of He-Who-Watches, I encourage you to attempt to call forth your power.”

Brisbane did nothing.

Wizard smiled. “I thought not. Tomorrow, you will answer my questions.” He turned with a flourish and went back into the cave with Vrak right on his heels.

Brisbane rubbed his aching hands and tried to ignore the group of orks who did not disperse with Wizard’s exit.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.