CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

FARCHRIST TALES

BOOK THREE:

THE UNDERGOD

At the time, I had thought my secret meetings with Roy Stonerow, where he taught me rudimentary magic and gave me a different vision of the universe, were just that—secret. But now I can’t help but wonder if Otis and my mother might have had some inkling of what I was up to. With the benefit of adult hindsight, it is difficult to believe a young teenage boy could have kept such a thing hidden from his parents in such a small town. But I still like to think they were ignorant, especially my mother. Even now I am just beginning to realize the kind of pain she must have felt knowing what her son was doing in that little red house down the street. I guess I will never know if she knew or not, but I have to say I did not do what I did, I did not learn what I learned, out of any kind of spite for the way of life she offered me. It is a good way, her life, and for thousands it is all they will ever need, but it was not for me. I am not proud of this, but neither am I ashamed.

+ + +

Brisbane followed the back of the black-clad ork down a short, dark hallway with Ternosh and Wister right behind him. The procession marched on in silence and shortly they emerged in another large chamber lit by the flickering light of torches.

How do they keep all these torches lit? Brisbane wondered briefly. And where is all the smoke? These things are burning constantly and none of these rooms are smoky.

Brisbane’s wonderment about the torches did not last long. His attention was quickly captured by the shape and contents of the chamber before him. It was circular, nearly as huge as the banquet chamber, and in the center of the room was a pit, an arena that dropped ten feet below the floor of the chamber with no visible means of entrance or exit. The floor just suddenly gave way and dropped straight down to the circular pit. All around the pit, the pug-trolang which it had to be, were stone benches like the ones surrounding the table in the banquet chamber, except in two places. If the pit was the face of a clock, at six o’clock sat a stone chair and at twelve o’clock stood a stone pedestal. On the pedestal was a golden incense burner like the one Ternosh had used to summon his Demosk.

And, leaning against the face of the pedestal, scabbarded and point down on the edge of the pug-trolang, was Angelika, her emerald twinkling in the torchlight.

Brisbane’s heart rose into his throat as he saw her. Angelika! his mind called out to her. I have found you!

—Be patient,— was her only reply. —Be patient and be strong.—

The black-clad orks quickly went ahead and took their seats around the pit. Ternosh held Brisbane back and Wister stood solidly beside Tornestor. The Sumak gestured to the outer wall of the circular chamber and Brisbane saw it was lined with racks of weapons, red-eye shields, and black armor.

“Grum Wister and Grum Brisbane,” Tornestor said. “These are the finest weapons and armor of the clan. Choose well and may they serve you well in the pug-trolang.”

Wister immediately went to the wall and began to put on a chainmail vest that had been hanging there. Brisbane turned to Tornestor.

“Sumak Tornestor,” he said, summoning as much respect as he could into his voice. “Am I to understand I may arm myself with any weapon here?”

Tornestor looked at Brisbane with a look mixed of surprise and contempt. “You are unfamiliar with our ways,” the Sumak said. “You are not to speak to me unless I speak to you first. I will forget your indiscretion this time. Yes, the choice of weapon is yours.”

Brisbane bowed his head. “I am sorry for misspeaking.” He brought his head up and pointed at Angelika. “May I use that sword?”

Wister was picking out a shield.

Tornestor looked at the sword and then turned back to Brisbane. “No,” he said. “That weapon bares an enchantment upon it and it has been given as a gift to Gruumsh One-Eye. No one may use it.”

Of course you can’t use her, Brisbane told himself. That would have been too easy. He quickly bowed again and backed away from the Sumak.

Tornestor began to discuss something with Ternosh and Brisbane was left alone to arm himself. He looked back at Wister and saw the ork had chosen a huge battle axe to fight with. Brisbane turned back to the weapons.

Angelika, he thought. They won’t let me use you. What should I do?

—Patience, young Brisbane. You will wield me soon enough. You can defeat this evil creature without me. These demons think they can control you and me, but they cannot. Our time will come.—

Demons? Brisbane thought.

—They are abominations of nature, Brisbane. They must be destroyed.—

Brisbane began to look through the pieces of armor, searching for something that would protect him and yet not hamper his movements. He found a chainmail shirt, much like the vest Wister had chosen, and after removing his cumbersome red and white robes, he put it on over the simple cloth shirt and pants he wore underneath. The stiff material under the chains of the armor was black.

Abominations, Angelika?

—Abominations, Brisbane. Twisted creatures of evil born against the will of Grecolus. They must be destroyed.—

Angelika’s voice was like an itch in his head. Brisbane blindly picked a round red-eye shield off the wall and began to examine a rack full of all sorts of swords.

—Choose well, young Brisbane. Even in this den of evil there are some blades of quality. You’ll need something sharp and sturdy to gut this devil.—

Brisbane picked up a sword and swung it experimentally through the air. Its balance was too far off so he returned it to the rack. He chose another and, liking the feel of this one, tested its sharpness against the heel of his head. The weapon was double-edged and had been recently sharpened and oiled. Whoever it had belonged to before the orks got hold of it had taken good care of it.

—A fine weapon, Brisbane. More than enough to spill evil blood.—

Brisbane, oblivious to his surroundings, began to take the sword through the combat exercises Roundtower had taught him so long ago. He whirled it through striking thrusts and defensive postures, getting into the feel of the blade. It felt good in his hands and Brisbane began to speed up the execution of his exercises.

—Yes, Brisbane. That’s the way. You and the sword. You are one.—

Brisbane finished, bringing the blade to his side as if he had a scabbard to put it in. He suddenly became aware of where he was and he looked stiffly up at the orks watching him. Ternosh had left, but both Tornestor and Wister were there, their eyes betraying a certain amazement they felt for what they had just seen.

Brisbane met Wister’s red eyes. “Let’s do it.”

Wister actually smiled at Brisbane and then started off in the direction of the pug-trolang. Brisbane fell into step behind him and Tornestor followed the human.

When they arrived at the edge of the pit, Tornestor took the seat that had been placed there for him and Wister and Brisbane dropped themselves down into the battle circle. They took positions about ten feet apart, facing each other, and stood still waiting for the command to begin.

Brisbane looked up at the edge of the pit and at the orkish faces looking down on him. The black-clad orks sat evenly spaced around the circle, and the two with red stripes sat on either side of the Sumak as they had at dinner. Brisbane was surprised to see Ternosh standing next to the pedestal—and Angelika—with his hands clasped behind his back. Brisbane turned back to Wister and found himself in the middle of an angry staring match.

A hush fell over the proceedings as Tornestor rose to his full seven feet. “The klatru of the Clan of the Red Eye,” he announced formally, “has gathered here around the pug-trolang to witness a masokom between our brothers as described in the ancient ways. At my signal, Grum Wister and Grum Brisbane was clash in battle that will not stop until one of them is dead and gone on to Gruumsh’s battlefield.”

“Praise be to the victor,” the assemblage chanted as one. “And strength to the loser in his new conflict.”

“Grumak Ternosh,” Tornestor said. “Summon your Demosk to witness the masokom.”

Tornestor sat and Ternosh lifted the lid off the incense burner. The Grumak waved his hand over it and Brisbane saw a spark jump off one of his fingers and fall into the golden vessel.

He’s summoning his Demosk, Brisbane thought as Wister’s eyes bore into him. Super. That smoke is going to make us all loopy. I’ll be lucky just to see Wister, to say nothing about killing him.

—He is not your match, Brisbane. None of them are.—

Brisbane looked up to see Angelika but his eyes were drawn to the smoke already pouring out of the five-pointed vents in the lid of the incense burner. Ternosh began his eerie chanting and Brisbane turned back to his opponent.

Wister stood taut, like a dog on a chain, and as the white smoke began to swirl around him, Brisbane thought the ork began to look more and more like a dog. His pig snout became a furry muzzle and his pig ears flopped down like those of a lap dog. The vision was fleeting and sporadic, as most of the smoke stayed well above the floor of the pug-trolang. Every once and a while, a wisp would blow in front of Brisbane, smelling thickly of oranges, distorting Wister from an armored pig-man to an armored dog-man. For a gleeful moment, Brisbane tried to decide which vision was uglier.

Brisbane decided it would be best not to take his eyes off Wister again. There was no telling exactly when Tornestor’s order to commence combat would come, but Brisbane knew when it did, Wister would be on him like all the fury in the hells. To his right, where Ternosh and the pedestal—and Angelika—were, he heard a familiar voice.

“Why have you summoned me, Grumak Ternosh?”

The Demosk. The voice was inside his head again, but this time he could clearly hear it in his ears, too. Except the voice in his mind was speaking common and the voice in his ears was speaking orkish. The effect was strange and unsettling. Wister shifted his grip on the battle axe. Brisbane wondered again exactly what a Demosk was.

“A masokom,” Brisbane heard Ternosh say, “must be witnessed. Grum Wister has challenged Grum Brisbane.”

Brisbane’s head spun as a wisp of smoke flowed around it.

“I am ready,” the Demosk said.

Out of the corner of his smoke-irritated eye, Brisbane saw Sumak Tornestor rise to his feet again. Wister’s right foot took a half-step towards Brisbane and was slowly dragged back.

—Here it comes, Brisbane. The evil must be vanquished.—

“Begin!” Tornestor’s gravel voice boomed out over the pug-trolang and Wister seemed to fly at Brisbane, his shield held in front of him and the battle axe cocked back, ready to strike.

Brisbane stood his ground, watching the ork advance and the position of the weapon in his hand. Wister brought the axe down on Brisbane with deathly quickness, but Brisbane was able to shift to the ork’s side and deflect the blow with his shield.

The first clang of metal against metal was met with a rousing cheer from the orks assembled around the pit. Wister ran past Brisbane with his momentum and turned back when he was out of his attack range.

“I’m going to kill you, human!” the Grum shouted as he charged in and swung his axe sideways at Brisbane’s head.

Brisbane ducked easily under the sweeping strike and stabbed at Wister as his body turned a flank towards him. His blade glanced off the ork’s chainmail vest and left Wister uninjured. The ork brought the axe back in another sweeping arc, this one aimed at Brisbane’s midsection. Brisbane had plenty of time to back up and out of the path of the sharp blade and, as he did, a surprising realization came over him.

Wister was, quite simply, a terrible warrior. His attack was certainly ferocious, but it lacked any semblance of grace or finesse. The ork had no sort of practiced control over his weapon, he just madly swung it back and forth and up and down, hoping to hit his opponent and finish him off quickly. Surely if that axe blade did connect with Brisbane’s body, the combat would instantly be over, but the ork’s strikes were clumsy and repetitious, and Brisbane had no problem avoiding them.

Wister charged Brisbane again with a cry of rage and Brisbane easily rotated away from him, pushing the blow off his shield. The orks around the pit were cheering with every charge Wister made and they let out disappointed moans each time Brisbane thwarted the attack.

Wister was turning to charge again.

—What’s the matter?— Angelika’s voice tolled in his head, muted strangely by the effects of the incense smoke. —He has left himself open to your blade many times. Why do you not strike him down?—

“Die!” Wister screamed as Brisbane brushed off another charge and retreated back several steps.

He’s no warrior, Angelika.

Brisbane thought he was just thinking these words to his sword, but he must have said them aloud because Wister, who had been panting for breath, suddenly opened his eyes wide in senseless rage and jumped into another charge.

—Of course not. Evil can never stand up against holy forces. End his unnatural life, Brisbane. Destroy this evil monster.—

Brisbane pushed Wister’s charge aside and ineffectually struck his sword against the ork’s armor.

—That’s the way, Brisbane. Go for the head. It is foolishly unprotected.—

Angelika, this is not combat. It takes no skill to kill such an opponent.

Wister turned and stood panting out of Brisbane’s reach. Sweat was running down his pig face. Groans were beginning to come from the orks assembled around the pit—groans of displeasure. This was evidently not the sort of spectacle they had expected.

“…kill…you…human…” Wister said in between breaths in a mad litany of rage. He rushed into battle again but this time did not charge past Brisbane. Instead he stopped before him and began to engage in more traditional fighting.

This was much better than the crazy charges the ork had made before, but his attack was still unskilled and clumsy. Brisbane had no problem avoiding or deflecting the slow strikes of the battle axe. He could either dodge aside or absorb the impact on his shield and sometimes he could even foil an attack with the blade of his sword. Wister had left himself open to fatal attack many times, but each time he did, Brisbane found himself unable to take advantage of the opening. Occasionally, he would strike at Wister’s armor for show, knowing he would not hurt the ork that way. It was just hard for Brisbane to kill like this. The orks he had killed before had been somehow different. Their skill hadn’t been much better, but the circumstances had been very different. Then, he had been fighting to protect himself and the others in his party from a vicious attack begun by the orks. Now, it was a fight of honor, with rigid rules and customs, wholly different from the slaughter he had taken part in beside the Mystic River. It was hard for Brisbane to pinpoint, but this battle with Wister down here in the pug-trolang with the entire klatru watching was somehow more important than any battle he had ever fought before. It was important that he win this battle, but there was something else that seemed even more important. To strike Wister down so easily, like a rag doll, was far beneath what this kind of combat demanded. In a way, killing the ork with the ease of removing an opponent’s pawn from a chessboard would destroy the entire orkish institution of the masokom and the pug-trolang.

—What do you care of this? They are evil. They are the enemy.—

So I’ve been told.

Suddenly, Wister broke off his attack and stepped back and away from Brisbane. The ork looked up at the edge of the pit and Brisbane’s eyes followed his. The smoke from the burning incense was much thicker up there and through it Brisbane could make out the vague shapes of the other orks. The huge Tornestor at one end, the black-clad klatru lining the rim, and Ternosh with his glowing Demosk at the other. All were silent and seemed to be waiting for something.

Wister took a moment to catch his breath. He returned his gaze to Brisbane and quietly addressed the group. “He is toying with me,” the Grum said. “His skill far surpasses mine. I am no match for him. I declare myself the loser.”

With that statement, Wister dropped his shield and his axe on either side of himself and pulled his chainmail vest apart to reveal his hairy chest. “You have won, Grum Brisbane. Send me quickly to the army of Gruumsh One-Eye.” Wister closed his red eyes.

Brisbane was not sure what to do. Wister’s intention was obvious. He wanted Brisbane to plunge his sword into his heart, killing him. Wister had named him the winner, but now Brisbane felt like anything else but.

When Brisbane had not done anything for a full minute, Tornestor spoke. “Grum Brisbane, Grum Wister had conceded defeat. Will you not end the masokom?”

Brisbane kept his eyes on Wister. The ork had not moved or spoken since he had closed his eyes. Until Tornestor had spoken, Brisbane had thought all time had stopped.

“Must I?” Brisbane asked.

—Yes!—

“It is your duty,” Tornestor said. “Grum Wister has lost his challenge. He cannot be left alive.”

Brisbane slowly raised his sword. He looked at it carefully. It really was a fine weapon, well cared for and perfectly balanced.

—Do it, young Brisbane. It is your first step in regaining me. Do this and none of them will be able to stop you. I will be yours again. I will be yours.—

The voice was like sweet music in his head. Deep and throaty, if Angelika had been a woman she would have been fair of face of voluptuous of figure. The voice was that of a secret harem girl, the one kept in hiding who could please her master like no other. Brisbane listened to that voice and realized he was reacting exactly as if she were a woman whispering wet promises of sexual ecstasy instead of a sword directing him to kill Wister. His heart was beating hard and fast and he could feel the beginnings of an erection in his underpants.

Brisbane thrust his sword into Wister’s chest and the ork dropped to the floor, his life flooding out of the wound. There was no release for Brisbane, the way there should have been if the metaphor of sexual congress was to be extended. There was no sense of victory in it. There was only a sinking feeling of disgust that quivered in his gut and pulled his testicles back up close to his body.

—It is done. Praise Grecolus for his wisdom and Brisbane for his courage.—

Shut up, Angelika. Just shut up.

“Grum Brisbane has defeated Grum Wister,” Brisbane heard the Demosk say. “Do you require anything else of me, Grumak Ternosh?”

Brisbane looked up at Ternosh and the pedestal.

“No,” Ternosh said.

Instantly, the figure of the Demosk vanished and the smoke stopped coming out of the vents. Brisbane went over to the side of the pug-trolang and he was hauled out by some of the black-clad orks. By then the smoke that had filled the room had almost completely dissipated. Slowly and silently, the orks began to file out of the chamber, leaving only Ternosh, Brisbane, and the body of Wister in the pit. The orks all avoided eye contact with Brisbane as they strode past him.

“What now?” Brisbane asked the Grumak.

Ternosh took the sword and shield away from Brisbane and began to help him off with the chainmail shirt. “You have won,” he said. “You now take Wister’s place in the clan. You are now my first Grum.”

Brisbane looked down into the pit. “I’m your only Grum.”

“What was that?” Ternosh asked.

Brisbane shook his head. “What about his body?”

“It will be removed later.”

“What did he mean?” Brisbane asked. “What is the army of Gruumsh One-Eye?”

Ternosh sighed as he helped Brisbane back into his robes. “Another time, Brisbane. It has been a very long day.”

Brisbane agreed it had been a very long day indeed.

Ternosh said goodnight and left Brisbane alone in the chamber. On his way out, the Grumak put the armor and weapon back in the racks against the wall.

Brisbane turned to look at Angelika leaning against the pedestal under the incense burner. He thought about going over there and taking her. He thought about taking her and trying to find his way out of these caves. He thought about taking her and fighting his way out, killing anyone who stood between him and the exit. He thought about taking her and fighting his way out of the compound, killing the orks and their guard dogs in a mad rush for freedom. He thought about all these things, but in the end he decided to leave Angelika where she was for now and go back to his chamber. Ternosh had been right, it had been a long day, and anything he thought about doing could certainly wait until tomorrow.

Brisbane quickly got out of there before Angelika started talking to him again.

+ + +

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

Dead Man’s Walk by Larry McMurtry

This would have been a much better book if it wasn’t a prequel to Lonesome Dove.

In his epic masterpieces ‘Lonesome Dove’ and ‘Streets of Laredo,’ Larry McMurtry breathed new life into the vanished American West and created two of the most memorable heroes in contemporary fiction: Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call. Now McMurtry dazzles us once more with the long-awaited story of their early adventures.

As young Texas Rangers, Gus and Call have much to learn about survival in a land fraught with perils: not only blazing heat and raging tornadoes, roiling rivers and merciless Indians, but also the deadly whims of soldiers. On their first expeditions -- led by incompetent officers and accompanied by the robust, dauntless whore known as the Great Western -- they will face death at the hands of the cunning Comanche war chief Buffalo Hump and the silent Apache Gomez. They will be astonished by the Mexican army. And Gus will meet the love of his life….

That’s from the back of my paperback copy. And, as usual, Dead Man’s Walk is all of those things, but it is also -- possibly -- something not described.

Call and Gus stood together, watching. They had never before seen a party of Indians on the move. Of course, in San Antonio there were a few town Indians, drunk most of the time. Now and then they saw an Indian of a different type, one who looked capable of wild behaviour.

But even those unruly ones were nothing like what Call and Gus were watching now: a party of fighting Comanches, riding at ease through the country that was theirs. These Comanches were different from any men either of the young Rangers had ever seen. They were wild men, and yet skilled. Buffalo Hump had held a corpse on the back of his racing pony with one hand. He had scalped Zeke Moody without even getting off his horse. They were wild Indians, and it was their land they were riding through. Their rules were not white rules, and their thinking was not white thinking. Just watching them ride away affected young Gus and young Call powerfully. Neither of them spoke until the Comanches were almost out of sight.

This is clearly the story of “young Gus and young Call” and, as such, it is somewhat limited in its scope. Young Gus and Young Call, after all, have to grow up to be Old Gus and Old Call, so there are only so many scrapes that they can get into in Dead Man’s Walk. But their view here of the “wild Indians” is revealing for what it says and what it doesn’t. 

In the narrative, Buffalo Hump and his Comanche warriors had just attacked the squad of Texas Rangers, killing some and scalping others. The encounter unnerves young Gus and young Call, and makes them both realize that they -- even as famed Texas Rangers -- are up against something neither of them understand nor, likely, are competent to deal with. 

The land before him, which looked so empty, wasn’t. A people were there who knew the emptiness better than he did; they knew it even better than Bigfoot or Shadrach. They knew it and they claimed it. They were the people of the emptiness.

A lot of Dead Man’s Walk is about this journey through another people’s emptiness -- or, more pointedly; another people’s fullness that was only perceived as empty. Time and time again, young Gus and young Call will encounter these Comanches, and the Comanches will slowly kill more and more of their number, steal more and more of their horses, until they are practically alone and barefoot in the emptiness.

They were scared: they had ridden out of Austin into a world where the rules were not white rules, where torture and mutilation awaited the weak and the unwary, the slow, the young.

Thematically, there is this clash of cultures, this way in which “white rules” has been surrounded and subsumed by the “people of the emptiness,” and there are only a handful of times in which McMurtry allows the white rules to exert themselves.

“Ain’t you going to scalp him?” Bigfoot asked. “You killed him. It’s your scalp.”

Call was startled. It had never occurred to him to scalp the Comanche boy. He was a young boy. Although he was glad that he had escaped death himself, he felt no pride in the act he had just committed -- the boy had been daring, in his view, to float down a swollen river, armed only with a knife, clinging to a dead mule in hopes of surprising and killing an armed Ranger. The reward for his bravery had been a bullet wound that nearly tore his head off. He would never ride the prairies again, or raid farms. Although he had had to kill him, Call thought the boy’s bravery deserved better than what it had got him. There would be no time to bury the boy, anyway -- the thought of cutting his hair off did not appeal.

“No, I don’t want to scalp him,” Call said.

“He would have scalped you, if he could have,” Bigfoot said.

“I don’t doubt it,” Call said. “Scalping’s the Indian way. It ain’t my way.”

“It’ll be your way when you’re a year or two older, boy -- if you survive,” Shadrach said. Then he casually knelt by the Comanche boy and took his scalp. When he finished, he pulled the boy well back into the current and let him float away.

It’s small, and it’s feeble, but it is Call’s (and McMurtry’s) way of exerting his misplaced frontier morality. Most of the time, however, it is the Indians and their ways that drive the Rangers, not the other way around.

As Buffalo Hump approached, holding his spotted pony to a slow walk, Call felt the air change. The Comanche’s body shone with grease; a necklace made of claws hung on his bare chest. Call looked at Gus, to see if he felt the change, and Gus nodded. They had entered the air of the wild men -- even the smell of the Indian horses was different.

They change the very air around them, enveloping their white adversaries with an “air of danger,” or the “air where quick death is.”

And even when Call and Gus try to adapt to these Indian ways in order to better survive in their emptiness, they are miserable failures.

“How do Indians ever kill them?” Call asked, looking at the buffalo. It seemed to be merely resting, its head on its knees.

“Why, with arrows -- how else?” Bigfoot asked.

Call said nothing, but once again he felt a sense of trespass. It had taken three men, with rifles, pistols, and knives, an hour to kill one beast; yet, Indians did it with arrows alone -- he had watched them kill several on the floor of the Palo Duro Canyon.

A sense of trespass. That sums up the hidden part of Dead Man’s Walk pretty well. Gus and Call are trespassing in a place they don’t belong. They collide again and again with this rough reality, and throughout, despite all the painful lessons that they are given, they never seem to adapt or truly learn.

“We’re back where it’s wild again,” Call said.

Lady Carey happened to overhear the remark -- she drew rein for a moment, looking toward a faint outline of mountains in the east.

“Yes, it’s wild, isn’t it,” she said. “It’s like a smell. I smelled it in Africa and now I smell it here.”

“It means we have to be careful,” Call said.

Lady Carey looked again at the distant mountains.

“Quite the contrary, Corporal Call,” she said. “It means we have to be wild, like the wild men.”

And that’s, ultimately, the problem. Young Gus and Young Call can’t be wild, because they have to become Old Gus and Old Call. Perhaps Dead’s Man Walk can be read as the set of experiences that helped form those essential characters, but, frankly, I found myself more frequently rooting for Buffalo Hump and wishing for his story to be more fully told.

+ + +

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

The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology by Robert Wright

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. 

+ + + 

Can you beat a book with two colons in its title? Or maybe that’s not the title, because on the first page it just says The Moral Animal, and on the second page it says The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life. Whatever the book is called, it’s both a real mindbender and probably the best book I’ve read on evolution. Wright gets my special praise primarily for the following passage:

Before we return to Darwin’s life, one caution is in order. So far we’ve been analyzing the human mind in the abstract; we’ve talked about “species-typical” adaptations designed to maximize fitness. When we shift our focus from the whole species to any one individual, we should not expect that person to chronically maximize fitness, to optimally convey his or her genes to future generations. And the reason goes beyond the one that has so far been stressed: that most human beings don’t live in an environment much like the one for which their minds were designed. Environments—even the environments for which organisms are designed—are unpredictable. That is why behavioral flexibility evolved in the first place. And unpredictability, by its nature, cannot be mastered. As John Tooby and Leda Cosmides have put it, “Natural selection cannot directly ‘see’ an individual organism in a specific situation and cause behavior to be adaptively tailored.”

Hallelujah. This is the first time I’ve seen it explicitly stated that people don’t necessarily consciously act in a way designed to move their genes into the next generation. In stating that humans live in an environment today that is radically different from the one in which we were shaped by evolution, Wright is making an essential point often overlooked or taken as given in other evolutionary texts. As he says:

Of course, the designs don’t always work. Individual organisms often fail, for various reasons, to transmit their genes. (Some are bound to fail. That is the reason evolution so assuredly happens.) In the case of human beings, moreover, the design work was done in a social environment quite different from the current environment. We live in cities and suburbs and watch TV and drink beer, all the while being pushed and pulled by feelings designed to propagate our genes in a small hunter-gatherer population. It’s no wonder that people often seem not to be pursuing any particular goal—happiness, inclusive fitness, whatever—very successfully.

But I still have a complaint. I wish the evolutionists would stop using verbs like “design” when talking about natural selection. There is no design in natural selection. There is no envisioned end product that natural selection is working to bring into existence, and too often the language that’s chosen to discuss the subject belies that reality. Wright is cognizant of this, and often uses quotation marks to indicate that he doesn’t mean what he’s saying literally, but feels compelled to use the convenient language.

Naturally, the level of the organism is of primary concern to human beings; human beings are organisms. But it’s of secondary importance to natural selection. If there is a sense in which natural selection “cares” about anything—and there is, metaphorically—that thing isn’t us; it’s the information in our sex cells, our eggs and our sperm. Of course, natural selection “wants” us to behave in certain ways. But, so long as we comply, it doesn’t care whether we are made happy or sad in the process, whether we get physically mangled, even whether we die. The only thing natural selection ultimately “wants” to keep in good shape is the information in our genes, and it will countenance any suffering on our part that serves this purpose.

I won’t beat Wright up too much over this. Although he flirts too frequently with the contradiction, he repeatedly tells us that he is flirting, and has helped me think about evolution in ways I haven’t before. I believe natural selection itself is a misnomer, as nothing is actually being “selected” by it. Natural selection is a result of what happens when certain genes that embody certain traits survive and proliferate over several generations and other genes that embody other traits don’t. Species adapt and change, but none of that is because they were selected to do so or designed for some specific end. As gravity is to mass, evolution is to reproduction—a quality inherently present in the medium.

But here’s the mindbending part:

It’s always hard to be sure that people really believe such excuses. But a famous series of experiments shows (in a quite different context) how oblivious the conscious mind can be to its real motivation, and how busily it sets about justifying the products of that motivation.

The experiments were conducted on “split-brain” patients—people who have had the link between left and right hemispheres cut to stop severe epileptic seizures. The surgery has surprisingly little effect on everyday behavior, but under contrived conditions, strange things can happen. If the word nut is flashed before the left eye (which leads to the right hemisphere), but not to the right eye (which leads to the left), the subject reports no conscious awareness of the signal; the information never enters the left hemisphere, which in most people controls language and seems to dominate consciousness. Meanwhile, though, the subject’s left hand—controlled by the right hemisphere—will, if allowed to rummage through a box of objects, seize on a nut. The subject reports no awareness of this fact unless allowed to see what his left hand is up to.

When it comes time for the subject to justify his behavior, the left brain passes from professed ignorance into unknowing dishonesty. One example: the command walk is sent to a man’s right brain, and he complies. When asked where he’s going, his left brain, not privy to the real reason, comes up with another one: he’s going to get a soda, he says, convinced. Another example: a nude image is flashed to the right brain of a woman, who then lets loose an embarrassed laugh. Asked what’s so funny, she give an answer that’s less racy than the truth.

Michael Gazzaniga, who conducted some of the split-brain experiments, has said that language is merely the “press agent” for other parts of the mind; it justifies whatever acts they induce, convincing the world that the actor is a reasonable, rational, upstanding person. It may be that the realm of consciousness itself is in large part such a press agent—the place where our unconsciously written press releases are infused with the conviction that gives them force. Consciousness cloaks the cold and self-serving logic of the genes in a variety of innocent guises. The Darwinian anthropologist Jerome Barkow has written, “It is possible to argue that the primary evolutionary function of the self is to be the organ of impression management (rather than, as our folk psychology would have it, a decision-maker).”

One could go further and suggest that the folk psychology itself is built into our genes. In other words, not only is the feeling that we are “consciously” in control of our behavior an illusion (as is suggested by other neurological experiments as well); it is a purposeful illusion, designed by natural selection to lend conviction to our claims. For centuries people have approached the philosophical debate over free will with the vague but powerful intuition that free will does exist; we (the conscious we) are in charge of our behavior. It is not beyond the pale to suggest that this nontrivial chunk of intellectual history can be ascribed fairly directly to natural selection—that one of the most hallowed of all philosophical positions is essentially an adaptation.

That’s right. We’re not really conscious beings, different from all the other animals on the planet that run purely on instinct. We have no free will. Our illusion of consciousness and free will is an evolutionary adaptation that has survived and flourished because it has better adapted us to our environment. Belief in our own consciousness and free will makes us more socially adaptable to our ever-changing environment by making us better able to convince others that our intentions are socially acceptable and not necessarily “driven” by our genes’ “desire” to survive into the next generation. I’ve heard theories of everything before, but this one really takes the cake. Want to get rid of God? Here you go. Evolution will not only destroy the biblical myth of creation, but will completely erase the concept of the soul. What is the soul of a man? Adaptable traits inherited by our procreating ancestors.

Even Wright seems blown away by this concept, that natural selection is responsible not just for our physical traits but our sense of superiority and the higher purpose in our lives:

One striking feature of the rewards and punishments dished out by the conscience is their lack of sensuality. The conscience doesn’t make us feel bad the way hunger feels bad, or good the way sex feels good. It makes us feel as if we have done something that’s wrong or something that’s right. Guilty or not guilty. It is amazing that a process as amoral and crassly pragmatic as natural selection could design a mental organ that makes us feel as if we’re in touch with higher truths. Truly a shameless ploy.

God help me, I can hear Rick Warren squirming on his cross when I read this. Brother Robert! Your conscience is not a shameless ploy of natural selection. It is the voice of God desperately trying to reach you. But Wright’s mind is closed to that possibility—more closed I think than anyone else I have ever read. He doesn’t even consider the alternative. For him evolution has to explain it all, and this is the best way he can find to explain things like the conscience and consciousness through evolution. If there is a hell, Wright is going to one day find himself in the hottest lake of fire it has.

But wait. Here’s where it goes from mindbending to freaky:

There are various ways to answer this question. Today, among biologists, one common answer is that evolution has no discernible end. Spencer, at any rate, believed evolution had tended to move species toward longer and more comfortable lives and the more secure rearing of offspring. Our mission, then, was to nourish these values. And the way to do so was to cooperate with one another, to be nice—to live in “permanently peaceful societies.”

All of this now lies in the dustbin of intellectual history. In 1903, the philosopher G. E. Moore decisively assaulted the idea of drawing values from evolution or, for that matter, from any aspect of observed nature. He labeled this error the “naturalistic fallacy.” Ever since, philosophers have worked hard not to commit it.

Moore wasn’t the first to question the inference of “ought” from “is.” John Stuart Mill had done it a few decades earlier. Mill’s dismissal of the naturalistic fallacy, much less technical and academic than Moore’s, was more simply compelling. Its key was to articulate clearly the usually unspoken assumption that typically underlies attempts to use nature as a guide to right conduct: namely, that nature was created by God and thus must embody his values. And, Mill added, not just any God. If, for example, God is not benevolent, then why honor his values? And if he is benevolent, but isn’t omnipotent, why suppose that he has managed to precisely embed his values in nature? So the question of whether nature deserves slavish emulation boils down to the question of whether nature appears to be the handiwork of a benevolent and omnipotent God.

Mill’s answer was: Are you kidding? In an essay called “Nature,” he wrote that nature “impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with stones like the first Christian martyr, starves them with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her exhalations, and has hundreds of other hideous deaths in reserve.” And she does all this “with the most supercilious disregard both of mercy and of justice, emptying her shafts upon the best and noblest indifferently with the meanest and worst…” Mill observed, “If there are any marks at all of special design in creation, one of the things most evidently designed is that a large proportion of all animals should pass their existence in tormenting and devouring other animals.” Anyone, “whatever kind of religious phrases he may use,” must concede “that if Nature and Man are both the works of a Being of perfect goodness, that Being intended Nature as a scheme to be amended, not imitated, by Man.” Nor, believed Mill, should we look for guidance to our moral intuition, a device “for consecrating all deep-seated prejudices.”

In other words, our nature, be it bred into us by natural selection or breathed into us by God, is something that we are to overcome, to rise above.

Darwin doesn’t seem to have spent much time agonizing over this conflict between natural selection’s “morality” and his own. If a parasitic wasp or a cat playing with mice embodies nature’s values—well, so much the worse for nature’s values. It is remarkable that a creative process devoted to selfishness could produce organisms which, having finally discerned this creator, reflect on this central value and reject it. More remarkable still, this happened in record time; the very first organism ever to see its creator did precisely that. Darwin’s moral sentiments, designed ultimately to serve selfishness, renounced this criterion of design as soon as it became explicit.

But can we do this? If consciousness itself is merely an adaptation of natural selection, a ploy to keep us from realizing we are acting on pure instinct so we can reason our way through changes in our environment, if free will is only a part of this parlor trick our own minds have been constructed to play on us, how can we possibly step outside of that paradigm and reject it? If natural selection explains it all, even consciousness and the illusion of free will, is it possible for us to have this kind of independent thought? Or isn’t it more likely that any act we think we might take to reject the logic and values of natural selection is one taken by our evolutionary doppelganger instead, and therefore part of the larger force we think we have rejected? Makes your head spin, doesn’t it?

There’s a few other random bits that seemed worth quoting:

One factor is the vulnerability of offspring. Following the generic male sexual strategy—roaming around, seducing and abandoning everything in sight—won’t do a male’s genes much good if the resulting offspring get eaten. That seems to be one reason so many bird species are monogamous, or at least relatively monogamous. Eggs left alone while the mother went out and hunted worms wouldn’t last long. When our ancestors moved from the forests out onto the savanna, they had to cope with fleet predators. And this was hardly the only new danger to the young. As the species got smarter and its posture more upright, female anatomy faced a paradox: walking upright implied a narrow pelvis, and thus a narrow birth canal, but the heads of babies were larger than ever. This is presumably why human infants are born prematurely in comparison to other primates. From early on, baby chimps can cling to their mother while she walks around, her hands unencumbered. Human babies, though, seriously compromise a mother’s food gathering. For many months, they’re mounds of helpless flesh: tiger bait.

The whole first part of this book is about men and women, about why they do the things they do in reproducing and how evolution and natural selection created it all. And it’s also where Wright rams home one of the central points of his book—that we are a species that live in an environment very different from the one we were adapted to by natural selection. I noted the above paragraph because it helps illustrate this. Why are human babies so helpless when they are born? Why are their heads so big and malleable? If you believe in God the answer is simple—because that’s the way God made it. If you believe in evolution—the answer is infinitely more complex. Nothing evolves simply or in a direct fashion. Everything is the result of an untold number of variables at play with one another. Our intelligence, walking upright, the pain of childbirth, the vulnerability of our young, our need to care for them. They’re all inter-related in ways we’ll probably never understand.

It is ironic that hints of mortality can draw a man into marriage, for often it is these same hints, much later, that drive him out, to seek fresh proof of his virility. But the irony dissolves when reduced to ultimate cause: both the impulses to profess lifelong love to a woman and to wander lie within a man by virtue of how often, in his ancestors, they led to progeny. In that sense, both are an apt antidote to mortality, thought in the end futile (except from the genes’ point of view), and, in the latter case—wandering—often destructive as well.

I’m not sure I’ve even touched on this one yet, that emotions themselves are a product of natural selection, meaning we only feel the things that have been useful in propagating our species. The love I feel for my wife, according to this perspective, is only there because millions in the past who didn’t express such feelings did not reproduce and millions more who did express them did.

Morality is the device of an animal of exceptional cognitive complexity, pursuing its interests in an exceptionally complex social universe.

Somewhere along the way in the book Wright refers to the stages of moral development as expressed by Lawrence Kohlberg in 1971. The seemed interesting to me so I went out to the Internet and found them:

Stages of Moral Development

by Lawrence Kohlberg (1971)

I. Preconventional Level

At this level, the child is responsive to cultural rules and labels of good and bad, right or wrong, but he interprets the labels in terms of either the physical or hedonistic consequences of action (punishment, reward, exchange of favors) or the physical power of those who enunciate the rules and labels. The level is divided into the following three stages:

Stage 0: Egocentric judgement. The child makes judgements of good on the basis of what he likes and wants or what helps him, and bad on the basis of what he does not like or what hurts him. He has no concept of rules or of obligations to obey or conform to independent of his wish.

Stage 1: The punishment and obedience orientation. The physical consequences of action determine its goodness or badness regardless of the human meaning or value of these consequences. Avoidance of punishment and unquestioning deference to power are values in their own right, not in terms of respect for an underlying moral order supported by punishment and authority (the latter is stage 4).

Stage 2: The instrumental relativist orientation. Right action consists of what instrumentally satisfies one's own needs and occasionally the needs of others. Human relations are viewed in terms such as those of the market place. Elements of fairness, reciprocity, and equal sharing are present, but they are always interpreted in a physical, pragmatic way. Reciprocity is a matter of "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours", not loyalty, gratitude, or justice.

II. Conventional Level

At this level, the individual perceives the maintenance of the expectations of his family, group, or nation as valuable in its own right, regardless of immediate and obvious consequences. The attitude is not only one of conformity to personal expectations and social order, but of loyalty to it, of actively maintaining, supporting, and justifying the order and identifying with the persons or group involved in it. The level consists of the following two stages:

Stage 3: The interpersonal concordance or "good boy-nice girl" orientation. Good behavior is what pleases or helps others and is approved by them. There is much conformity to stereotypical images of what is majority or "natural" behavior. Behavior is frequently judged by intention -- "he means well" becomes important for the first time. One earns approval by being "nice".

Stage 4: The "law and order" orientation. The individual is oriented toward authority, fixed rules, and the maintenance of the social order. Right behavior consists in doing one's duty, showing respect for authority, and maintaining the given social order for its own sake.

III. Post-Conventional, Autonomous, or Principled Level

The individual makes a clear effort to define moral values and principles that have validity and application apart from the authority of the groups of persons holding them and apart from the individual's own identification with the group. The level has the two following stages:

Stage 5: The social-contract legalistic orientation (generally with utilitarian overtones). Right action tends to be defined in terms of general individual rights and standards that have been critically examined and agreed upon by the whole society. There is a clear awareness of the relativism of personal values and opinions and a corresponding emphasis upon procedural rules for reaching consensus. Aside from what is constitutionally and democratically agreed upon, right action is a matter of personal values and opinions. The result is an emphasis upon the "legal point of view", but with an additional emphasis upon the possibility of changing the law in terms of rational considerations of social utility (rather than freezing it in terms of stage 4 "law and order"). Outside the legal realm, free agreement, and contract, is the binding element of obligation. The "official" morality of the American government and Constitution is at this stage.

Stage 6: The universal ethical-principle orientation. Right is defined by the decision of conscience in accord with self-chosen ethical principles that appeal to logical comprehensiveness, universality, and consistency. These principles are abstract and ethical (the Golden Rule, the categorical imperative); they are not concrete moral rules like the Ten Commandments. At heart, these are universal principles of justice, of the reciprocity and equality of the human rights, and of respect for the dignity of human beings as individual persons.

After reading them, I’m not sure they were all that interesting after all.

One more thing about The Moral Animal. It was confusing as hell. Interesting and thought-provoking, but confusing as hell. It was clear that Wright was trying to argue a consistent point of view throughout, but his subject matter is so opaque, he could have said the direct opposite thing on page 400 that he said on page 4 and I wouldn’t have known the difference.

+ + +

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

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

FARCHRIST TALES

BOOK THREE:

THE UNDERGOD

I took the pendant home and showed it to Otis and my mother, liking its shape and the way it glinted in the sunlight. What followed was as big a shock to me as the medallion was to them. My stepfather took the trinket from me and then violently shook me until I told him where and how I had gotten it. Crying, I told him all I knew. I was spanked and punished, and then Otis lectured me on what the five-pointed star stood for and the dangers of associating with men who bore it as their symbol. I said I was sorry and that I had not known and together, Otis and I, we prayed to Grecolus for forgiveness. The matter was settled, even though I still was not sure exactly what I was asking forgiveness for, and Otis threw the pendant deep into the small copse of trees that grew behind our home. It took a long time, skipping out whenever I had an hour or two of free time, but eventually I found it and secretly hid the medallion in my room.

+ + +

Dinner was, in many ways, not what Brisbane expected it to be. After Smurch had helped him into his robes—Brisbane did not seem able to prevent the service—the half-ork took him directly to the banquet chamber where members of the klatru were already gathering to feast on what was their only meal of the day.

The chamber itself was conveniently located at the other end of the main corridor, opposite the bath chamber, and was by far the largest chamber Brisbane had seen so far. Gigantic might have been an understatement. It was so huge Brisbane could not even guess at its dimensions. It was roughly oval with plenty of exits scattered around the walls and a high, vaulted ceiling. Like the other main chambers in this complex, it was lit with torchlight and, in the very center of the room, a huge stone table stood surrounded by numerous stone benches.

There were several orks already seated at the table, none of whom Brisbane recognized, all dressed in black and drinking from great tankards. Smurch stopped Brisbane at one of the portals into the chamber.

“I am forbidden to enter until the time has come to serve the meal,” the half-ork said. “I must go to the kitchen now. Enjoy your meal, Grum Brisbane.”

Smurch walked quickly away from Brisbane and turned down one of the side tunnels. Brisbane raised a weak hand in a wave and said goodbye to his friend under his breath. Suddenly, he wasn’t so eager to go in there and get his dinner, even though he had eaten nothing but prison rations for the last two days. He took a small cautious step into the chamber and, when none of the orks at the table took notice of him, he took another. Soon he was moving steadily towards the center of the room and he did not stop until one of the orks looked up at him.

Their conversation suddenly went silent and all their heads pivoted up to look upon Brisbane. Brisbane stood frozen in their gazes and, for the briefest of moments, he was deadly sure they were going to rise up and snuff out his life.

“You that human Grum?” the ork who had first noticed him asked.

Brisbane could not find his voice. There were eight orks at the table, all of them larger than Brisbane and all of them more fierce-looking than any creatures he had ever seen. He might have turned and fled in fear if a sarcastic vein in his body hadn’t ballooned up and said to his mind, What the hells kind of question is that, dumb ass? Who else would I be, an unarmed human so deep in the lair of a clan or orks?

“Yes,” Brisbane said finally.

The ork nodded his head and fell back into conversation with his comrades around the table. They were speaking orkish and Brisbane couldn’t help but think they were doing that just to spite him. He still did not feel comfortable enough to go on over and take a seat at the table, a seat Smurch would probably have said he now deserved, so he stood lamely in place and tried to will someone he knew into the room. At this point, he would have even been glad to see Wister.

Fortunately, it was not long before Ternosh entered the chamber with Wister right on his heels. The Grum went over to take his place at the table while Ternosh spotted Brisbane and came over to him.

“Well, Brisbane,” the Grumak said kindly. “I see you are now properly attired. I hope you are taking easily to your new life. I imagine it is quite different from the one you knew before.”

Brisbane was still not used to the Grumak’s friendliness. Until what had happened with the Demosk, Ternosh had seemed ready to gut Brisbane with a paring knife, and now it was all warm greetings and friendly overtures. Brisbane did not trust it.

“Things are going okay,” he said cautiously.

Ternosh actually smiled. “This will be your first dinner with us. I’m glad I have a moment to talk to you a little bit before the meal begins.”

“Go ahead,” Brisbane said.

“You may have noticed,” the Grumak said, “that dinner is the only meal we grugan eat in the day.”

“I have,” Brisbane said as he held his stomach.

Ternosh chuckled. “Yes,” he nodded. “Very good. Perhaps because it is our only meal, it has taken on quite a bit of importance in our lives. It’s more than just a meal, it’s a gathering time, when peers come together to eat, drink, talk, and celebrate. The grugan word for it is draknel.”

“Kind of like a holiday feast every day?”

“Yes,” Ternosh said, sounding surprised. “That is one way of putting it. Now, since this is your first draknel, and you are still learning our customs, I think it would be best if you kept to yourself as much as you can. Eat your fill, by all means, but do not initiate any conversations. If questions are put to you, answer them simply and respectfully, but do not offer any needless information. I am telling you to do this for your own safety. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Brisbane said.

“Fine,” Ternosh said. “When we take our seats at the table, I will sit between you and Wister and you will sit on my left. You may pour yourself some ale and drink it if you wish, but you are not allowed to eat anything until Clan Chief—we call the position Sumak—Tornestor has been seated and has begun to eat. Is that clear?”

Brisbane looked briefly over at the table of orks. Wister was not drinking nor was he conversing with the others.

“I’ll just follow your lead,” Brisbane said. “I won’t do anything unless you do it first.”

The Grumak clapped Brisbane on the shoulder. “That will probably be the best way to handle it. Are you ready?”

“I suppose so,” Brisbane said, not really sure if he was or not.

Ternosh led him over to the table and they took their seats, Brisbane on the Grumak’s left just like he had been told. The black-clad orks were separated away from Brisbane and the red-eyed orks by the many angles cut into the edge of the table. It was a huge sprawling thing, roughly oval but with many sides to it. At one end of it sat a stone chair, not a bench like everyone else was sitting on, but a chair. A throne perhaps, with a high back and regal arms.

Ternosh poured himself a tankard of ale and then poured one for Brisbane. Brisbane took the drink and sipped it, lighting a small fire in his belly and reminding him just how hungry he was. The ale was a fine brew, probably stolen from some merchant on one of the roads, and was much better than the swill Shortwhiskers had taken from the orks on the bank of the Mystic River. They had red eyes on their shields, Brisbane reminded himself. They were members of this clan. When he had first seen their shields, Brisbane had wondered about the great red orbs on them. Now he knew they were representations of the one great unwinking eye of Gruumsh One-Eye, a god Brisbane now had to feign allegiance to. Until he could find Angelika and escape with her, Gildegarde Brisbane III was now Grum Brisbane, wizard and priest-in-training of Gruumsh One-Eye.

A silence fell over the orks at the table. Brisbane looked up and, at one of the many entrances to the chamber, he saw an ork who could only have been Sumak Tornestor.

The chief was huge. His pink pig ears twitched nearly seven feet above the floor and his shoulders stuck out from his neck like the wings of a great bird of prey. Like the orks at the table, he was dressed all in black—black boots, black trousers, and black tunic—but he had a red sash draped over a shoulder that crossed his body on a diagonal. He strode into the room like he owned it which, Brisbane thought, he probably did, followed by two more black-clad orks, these two each with a red stripe on their right sleeves, and sat heavily on the stone chair at what now was no doubt the head of the table. The two orks who followed him sat on benches on either side of the Sumak.

“The Clan of the Red Eye,” Tornestor said in a voice like sandpaper, “extends welcome to Grum Brisbane on the occasion of his first draknel.”

“Welcome,” a chorus of deep voices chanted all around the table.

Ternosh leaned and whispered in Brisbane’s ear. “Say, ‘Thank you all.’”

“Thank you all,” Brisbane said, pitching his voice as low as possible.

Tornestor nodded his head as he appraised Brisbane with his eyes. “And now, before I have the food brought in, does anyone have any statements they wish to make?”

Heads turned back and forth up and down the table. There were perhaps twenty seconds of silence before Wister rose to his feet.

“Grum Wister,” Tornestor said gravely. “You wish to invoke your right of statement. What do you say?”

Brisbane took another sip of his ale and shifted his weight on his bench. He was doing just what Ternosh had warned him to do, minding his own business.

Wister cleared his throat. “I would like to issue a challenge, Sumak Tornestor.”

Mumbles bounced around the table. Tornestor’s brow wrinkled and Brisbane did not think he looked pleased.

“A challenge has not been issued in this hall for quite some time, Grum Wister,” Tornestor said. “But that does not prevent you from issuing one now. You may continue.”

“I do not issue it lightly, Sumak Tornestor,” Wister said. “I have given it a great deal of thought. I have decided I cannot share my position in this clan with a human. I challenge Grum Brisbane.”

Brisbane heard his name called out and saw all the eyes around the table turn to him. He did not know what this challenge meant, but he had the feeling it was not good news.

Ternosh leapt to his feet.

Tornestor turned to his brother. “You have something to say, Grumak Ternosh?”

“I do, Sumak Tornestor.” Ternosh gestured towards Brisbane. “He was sent here by Gruumsh One-Eye. His purpose among us in still unknown, but it must be direfully important for Gruumsh to send a human to do it. We cannot allow him to face Wister, or anyone else, in a challenge. What would happen to us all if Brisbane were to lose? Gruumsh’s purpose would go undone.”

Tornestor faced Wister. “Grum Wister?”

“I have considered this, Sumak Tornestor,” Wister said carefully, “and it means nothing to me. I will not share my position in this clan with a human. My oath to Gruumsh compels me to no other action.”

Brisbane tried to rise to his feet but Ternosh pushed him back down with a hand on his shoulder. He still didn’t know what this was all about, but he was getting tired of the way Wister said human. Brisbane figured Wister had been planning this since he first heard the news about Brisbane. That’s why he was so rude to me in the work chamber. He wants nothing to do with me.

Tornestor rubbed his chin. “Ternosh, did your Demosk say Grum Brisbane was to receive special considerations while he lived among us?”

Ternosh paused. “No, Sumak Tornestor.”

“What exactly did it say about Brisbane?”

Brisbane’s ears perked up. This was exactly what he wanted to know.

“The Demosk said three things about Brisbane,” Ternosh said. “First, it said Brisbane’s blood carried the bane of Gruumsh One-Eye. He can work magic and is entitled to possess the pentacle medallion he wears around his neck. Second, the Demosk said Gruumsh had granted this power to a human because he had a special plan for Brisbane among us. And thirdly, it said Brisbane was to be treated as a member of our clan.”

“That is a bit vague,” Tornestor said.

“Information gathering with my Demosk can be a time-consuming practice,” Ternosh said. “That is all I have had time to discover so far.”

Both Ternosh and Wister were still standing while they argued their cases before Tornestor. All the other orks remained seated, quietly drinking their ale. Brisbane could tell some of them were very interested in how this all turned out. Others, Brisbane felt, could not have cared less about it and were just waiting for their dinner to be served.

“It is my job as Sumak of this clan,” Tornestor said, “to listen to the information my Grumak receives from his Demosk and decide how that information would best serve the clan. Is this not true?”

“Of course it is,” Ternosh admitted.

“Brisbane is to be treated as a member of our clan, the Demosk has said,” Tornestor went on, his brow wrinkling as he forced the logic out of his mouth. “This, I have seen to. His blood bares the bane of Gruumsh One-Eye and, even though he does not have red eyes, I have allowed him to assume the position of Grum among us. This is how any grugan with the power of magic would have been treated. This is just and right.”

Brisbane tried to stand up again but Ternosh firmly pushed him back down on the bench.

“However,” the clan chief said, “the rights of challenge and the pit of combat are also part of our society and Grum Brisbane, as a member of the Clan of the Red Eye, should not be exempt from them. Grum Wister is just in issuing his challenge, his rights shall not be denied because of Brisbane’s mysterious origin, and after this evening’s draknel, in the traditional manner, Wister’s challenge shall be answered.”

Both Wister and Ternosh slowly bowed and then reseated themselves.

“I, Sumak Tornestor, have spoken.”

Tornestor clapped his hands twice and immediately the table erupted again in loud conversations and servants entered the chamber carrying platters of food.

Brisbane turned to Ternosh as a steaming plate of potatoes and vegetables was set near him. “So what was that all about?” he asked the Grumak softly. “What exactly does this challenge mean?”

Ternosh picked a plate off a nearby pile and began to spoon potatoes onto it. “Wister has challenged you to combat. After the draknel, you two will fight and the winner will retain the right to be my Grum.”

The smell of the food was inebriating. Brisbane took a big platter of sliced meat from the ork on his left and began to fill his plate. “And the loser?”

Ternosh spooned some potatoes onto Brisbane’s plate. “The loser will be dead. It is a fight to the death.”

To the death.

Swell.

Brisbane stole a couple of looks at Wister, but the Grum ignored him completely. The ork was of average size for his race, which meant he was about Brisbane’s size. Brisbane may have been somewhat of a giant among humans, but among orks, he was as average as the night was dark. More food was passed around the table and Brisbane continued to pile his plate high with a little bit of everything.

“Do we use weapons or something?” Brisbane asked the Grumak. He hated the thought of hand-to-hand combat to the death. He wasn’t very good at street fighting.

“Armor and weapons,” Ternosh said curtly. “Now shut up and mind your manners.”

By this time, all had their plates full and their forks poised. Brisbane remembered not to start eating until Tornestor did, but the aroma coming off his plate nearly drove him mad. He joined everyone else at the table in silence and in staring at the Sumak.

Tornestor paused for a dramatic moment and then dived into his food. A second later, Brisbane and the other orks did the same. The food was delicious. Brisbane ate with an abandon he was sure Otis would have called gluttonous. Brisbane didn’t care. Let Otis have only six small strips of salty meat for two days and then serve him a feast like this and see how much he ate.

Brisbane devoured helping after helping, but through it all, his thoughts were on the challenge Wister had issued to him. Evidently, it wasn’t an ork’s right to refuse a challenge. At least, no one had asked him if he wanted to pick up the glove Wister had thrown down. But Brisbane guessed that wasn’t important for, even if he had been asked, he would not have turned down Wister’s challenge.

He could not, as Brisbane saw it. If he was ever going to get Angelika back, he had to mold into the society of the clan, and this challenge and the pit of combat, whatever that was, were obviously very important to the life of the klatru. Brisbane could not let himself be excluded from that. Ternosh had seemed displeased with Tornestor’s decision, but Brisbane had heard the reasoning behind it and he agreed with it.

Also, Brisbane knew, Wister’s feelings, his hatred of Brisbane because he was human, could not be a sentiment exclusive to Wister. If Brisbane somehow shirked the challenge, what would the orks who hated him for being human think of him then? Brisbane remembered the faces around the table when Tornestor had been casting judgment on Wister’s challenge—the ones that had seemed lined with concern over whether or not Brisbane would be forced to face the challenge—and he thought he knew which ones resented him on the basis of his position and his race. To face Wister in combat was perhaps to gain respect in their eyes.

But then again, this was not an arm wrestling contest. This was a fight to the death. Ternosh had said the combat would be done with armor and weapons, and Brisbane was glad for that. In his opinion, a sword in his hand increased his odds of winning to a more comfortable margin. If he could somehow use Angelika against Wister, he would have no doubts about winning the contest at all.

Eventually, the meal was finished and servants re-entered the chamber to clear the table. Brisbane saw Smurch was among them, but the half-ork paid no attention to his new master and soon he and the other servants left the chamber with the many dirty dishes and the few leftovers.

Brisbane was full, fuller than he had been in a long time, but he had stayed away from too much ale to keep his head clear in the coming battle. He noticed Wister had done the same. Just as he began to wonder what was going to happen next, Tornestor rose to his feet and addressed the table.

“Gentlemen,” the Sumak said. “In the tradition handed down through generations, a tradition begun in the time Gruumsh One-Eye himself walked the earth, a challenge, a masokom, has been issued by one of our number against another. We have all heard the reasons for this masokom. Are there any here who would deny Grum Wister his right in challenging Grum Brisbane?”

The table was silent.

“Then let us move to the pug-trolang, the pit of combat, to settle this masokom before our own eyes.”

All around the table the orks got to their feet. Brisbane, imitatively, did the same. Tornestor and the two orks with the red stripes on their sleeves began to move towards a wide exit from the room, opposite the one Brisbane had used before the draknel. The other black-clad orks soon followed and, when he was given a little shove from Ternosh, so did Brisbane, the Grumak, and Wister.

Brisbane was not sure what lay in store for him at the pit of combat, the pug-trolang, but he was sure he was doing the right thing in facing Wister. He was confident he could defeat the Grum and he was ready to show the rest of the klatru he wasn’t some puny human they could push around like the ones they kept in the circus wagons on the surface.

+ + +

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