Between a Rok and a steep place

Against the backdrop of a tired Orcish nation winding down from war, still struggling to normalise peace over aggression, Rok found his skills as a veteran scout in waning demand. Returning to society wasn't the first concern of many former military units. Some turned to banditry, others formed new communes, still others travelled afar to serve as mercenaries; but Rok's band had at its core, like the hub of a wheel, the witch Bula - and she held political ambitions.
The former great war-leader Orgug Nala was ostentatious in his lust and drive for power, and equally unquiet in his criticism of the peace. Bula made sure to settle their unit into as many civilian roles as could be found close to Orgug's demesne, and set about finding ways to demonstrate their - and above all her - usefulness to such an ambitious general. Rok himself was uneasy with this path, being sympathetic with the half of the Invang who desired, if not necessarily peace, certainly stability and room to regrow their nation. Still, the unit was his family, and Bula fast becoming a mentor beyond mentors; for all that he'd learned eagerly from the greyhair veterans, Bula's twisting cunning was unlike he'd ever seen.

One winter's morning, a message came - via intermediary, as spiders like Bula often use. A cart of rare timber of the finest quality for bow-making was due in trade to the powers-that-were. Rok being the former unit's best scout, knowing the delievery destination well despite it lying leagues to the south, and that timber being of great interest to Orgug, Bula enquired to know if he perhaps had some convenient means to divert the cart inexplicably northwards. And the tracker Torj, being a good friend and compatriot of Rok's, might perhaps have business to the south too...

Rok and Torj set off the same day.

They devised to ambush the cart as it climbed a steep pass, the land falling away to the west in a steep escarpment to the river below, and the road bordered on the east by pine forest. Almost too obvious a place, but there were no guards on the wagon, for who would expect mere timber to be taken, and deep in the settled lands? The single driver, a young orc woman, bore scars beneath her hood that neither Torj nor Rok spotted until they were upon her and her blade was in hand.

The struggle was bitter but short. From Rok she took his own blade, and gave her mark on his left cheek. To Torj she gave curses, and took the kick that sent her falling away in a shower of dirt, stones, and crushed undergrowth. Such was life in the Invang, Rok briefly reflected in the seconds before the reins she had wrapped around her wrist caught, startled the blinkered horses, and sent the cart too careening down the slope.

The screams of the dying horses were not as painful to Rok's ears as the splintering of the precious timber.

They stood there silently for some minutes, neither daring to risk voicing the possibility of recovering the wood - for both knew that to be work for many men, with mountain gear besides. And almost worse, the loss of a near incalculably valuable young fighting woman for no gain in return. It was hard truth that war made for poor population growth.

There it would have ended, in nothing more than the shame of failure, but for a chance encounter some months later with a diplomatic party arriving from the south; a party led by none other than the orc woman who Rok and Torj had assumed dead. Several hundred foot of hard, steep ground, a rushing river below it... none could survive. Gods knew the horses hadn't. Yet there she was, Ulia she was named, and she knew the scar that she'd left on Rok's face, oh yes.
Of Torj though, of him she had felt only his boot and seen only the blur of his leaping aboard the cart.

This was too useful a tool for Ulia to ignore. The orc who had left her with a crippled arm. The orc who shamed her with the loss of such valuable cargo, for no gain of his own. Orgug Nala must honour the south by making good this insult. He must explain the temerity of sending his own retainers to take - worse, fail to take - wares from the south.

Rok dared make no answer. Politicking was for the likes of Bula, whose expression he couldn't read as Torj stepped forward. Aye, he said, aye he had seen Rok ride south with Booraz, and heard them talking of the coin they could make. It wasn't Orgug who had ordered such petty theft. Orgug had, and has, no need of such small thinking. No, this was the doing of Rok and Booraz, Booraz who died during the awful winter just past.
Still Rok dared not speak. Could not speak. Torj, who had scouted with him through the dark between the torchlines of the enemy host. Torj, who had pulled him one-armed from the mouth of the gorge when once they had been discovered and fled too incautiously. Yes, Torj, who ever spoke of how he would lead a war-party of his own one day. Torj, who spoke reverently of his family name and their former lands.

Bula, then. Rok met her eye, even as Orgug Nala proclaimed him Unclaimed, an exile, unwelcome, threw him to Ulia as a diplomatic gift. Bula's eye was hard. Yet she gave a slight tilt of the head, a lift of one eyebrow.

Later, as Rok packed away his few possessions and prepared to leave his family, his chest afire with shame and confusion, Bula came herself to his tent.

"You failed me, Rok. Me. Not Orgug. Torj is self-serving. I like him. You should have been quicker. Orgug was waiting for that timber. Had Torj not offered you up, Ulia could rightly have demanded retribution in gold, or worse. And that would have cost me. A failure is bad, but one that returns twice over... Go. I know you will thrive. Return not until you can repay your failure, and your failure's offspring."

Rok replied not, and he left the land of his birth.