Wings on my Back Read online

  Lailat was the upper city, which adjoined to the middle city by three wide serpentine highways and two bridges—the Golden bridge and the High bridge. Lailat, the resident neighborhood of the nobles and the high-born, contained the summer residences and estates of the king of Tantre and the rector of the School. It was a place where everything was available, but not just anyone could manage to get in.

  Andy was about to ask a passer-by how to get to the School when a sign with sickeningly neon-green writing caught his eye: “The Orten General School of Higher Magic.” You couldn’t miss it. Under the sign someone had written by hand: “For dummies: straight up the main avenue towards the lesser river port. Don’t get stuck by the horns in the school gates. No matter what! Hornies!”

  The lower sign suddenly flickered and turned into a little guy with a puzzled look on his face bashing the closed gates with his horns. Andy understood. It was graffiti with a local flavor; an illusion spell went with it. The folk creation of a student. The phantom little guy suddenly turned his head towards Andy and made an obscene gesture. Well now! It had taken on an emotional tone! That was hard core. Real artistic talent!

  Someone snickered behind him. Andy turned around. Two nice-looking young girls, one with blonde and one with black hair, and a lanky, awkward fellow, all of whom must have been about fourteen or fifteen, as he had been just a minute ago, were staring at the sign. The illusory guy wrapped his legs around the sign, hung upside down and reached his thin arms towards the blond, his red lips extending like a telescope towards her. Passers-by and onlookers laughed. The fellow and the girlfriend standing near the object of the little guy’s affections tried their best to keep a straight face. The girl, the center of attention of the crowd and the magical suitor, blushed to the ears to match the little guy’s red lips.

  Too much of a good thing. Andy headed in the direction of the arrow.

  “Excuse me! Excuse me, Mr., uh….” Andy heard behind him.

  “Kerr, Mr. Kerr,” he answered, not turning his head.

  With a quick step the trio from the street caught up with him. One of the pretty girls ran ahead, the one whose hair was as black as a raven’s wing, and asked:

  “Are you going to the School?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can we go with you?”

  “Why? Afraid you’ll get lost or something? It’s straight up the street to the gates from the horny guy.”

  “It’s just, we thought that you were… and us too, which’ll be more fun if we go together!”

  Why didn’t he brush them off? Hm, he was sick of it all. Enough! Enough hiding behind his hat and how about trying to actually get some friends! Although Andy wasn’t too keen on the word “get”—one could get a dog or get flees. Friends probably didn’t apply to the above list of creatures.

  “Okay.”

  “Okay what?” the girl seemed surprised.

  “You can go with me to the mages’ School,” Andy squinted and looked at the three with interest. It was clear. Judging by the way they stepped lightly, they were the children of local petty nobility who had seen better days. They had been let loose from their parental homes for the first time, sent out to sink or swim on their own. The kids, who were no fools, had directed their steps towards the Orten School of magic in hopes of passing the entrance exams. Apparently, the parents had donned the sacred circle more than once behind the children’s backs, wishing for them to put on a student’s uniform, get an education, not a bad one, even by the city standards, and (finally!) get out on their own and support themselves. Once they finished School, the parents would no longer have to worry about the fate of their offspring; mages in the kingdom were in great demand. If they didn’t get settled here, they would certainly find a place for themselves somewhere else.

  “And you aren’t afraid?”

  “What?”

  “To go with me?”

  “Why should we be afraid of you?” the lanky guy said in surprise. The ladies were quiet. “No, we’re not. We could go by ourselves, but what’s fear got to do with it?”

  “Quite simple. I’m not human,” Andy smiled ear to ear and turned to face the group.

  “?!” The girls’ eyes widened; the guy swallowed. It was the usual reaction. Everyone who lived beyond the borders of his home valley had the same feelings and reaction. He was so tired of it! He couldn’t wait to learn to weave a subtle spell and put on a mask!

  “Well, what do you think? Do you still wanna go for a walk with me?” Andy stopped smiling.

  “Awesome! But you’re not an orc?”

  Wow. Andy was surprised they’d used the informal form of address with him already (there were different forms of the word “you” in Alat, as there are in French and Spanish). The victim of the illusion’s inclinations had quickly gotten over the shock of it. “What’s with your eyes? Will you tell us?”

  Andy hesitated. So I wanted an unusual reaction? There you go! Enjoy it! Things are worse than I thought with these guys. No only are they poor, they also came from some backwoods town where they’d never heard of non-humans and lived with a patriarchal societal structure like they did thousands of years before the fall of the empire and quietly smoked their bamboo or whatever it was they smoked. Oh, how they’re glancing around at everything and drinking it all in. Probably, pooped their pants from delight. All grown up, had come to the big city all by themselves. They’re so naive! How did they even let people like them in to the city? Andy had no desire to play wet-nurse to some bumpkin kids… they were like kindergarteners, after all. His intuition slapped him on the shoulders—it’s up to you, my dear, to be the teacher of this traveling kindergarten class. His conscience, which had been temporarily beaten to a pulp near the city gates, suddenly revived and began to whack him on the head— you’re not going to ditch them, are you? Enough with the beating, I won’t ditch the kids! Targ take it, I’m sixteen! A nanny with a mustache… ok, still working on the mustache.

  “Hold on, alright, not all at once!” Andy lifted his hand. “It’s customary to introduce yourself first, before using the informal form of address. That goes for you, young lady. I’m not an illusion on a sign; I won’t extend my hand to you without a formal introduction by a distinguished person! So….”

  “Allow me to introduce myself. Rigaud Pront von Trand!” the lanky guy bowed his head. From the sudden movement, his long forelock covered half his face. Andy decided to call him “Slim.”

  “Marika Lucena von Trebits!” the blonde said and, lowering her eyes and staring at Andy’s hiking boots while curtsying. What was she expecting to find there? Nothing but dust.

  “Irma Lei von Bokk!” the second girl curtsied too, but she did not lower her eyes. She continued to amaze him, confidently meeting his blue eyes with her olive ones from under her dark bangs. She fluttered her lashes and bit her lip. Well now, girl, that’s too much! There’s no need. I’m made of stone. I’ve fallen prey to eye batting like that before.

  If these kids’ parents were barons, that meant they were barons too, according to the local system of ranks and titles. It just wasn’t clear whether they stood to inherit anything.

  In the silence that followed, Andy realized he was the only one who hadn’t introduced himself. He pulled his hat from his head and in a courteous half-bow, like the unforgettable musketeer, brushed off the dust from the road with the non-existent feather in his cap. The rules of etiquette called for a full introduction, but…

  “I beg you to address me without any formality—simply, Kerr.”

  The young people glanced at one another and the girls curtsied and Rigaud bowed, all in unison.

  “Nice to meet you.”

  Rigaud held the baronesses back with his arm:

  “Esteemed Kerr, why don’t you state your title…,” he began.

  “Rigaud! Look at me! Who am I? What kind of title do I have? I’m a non-human. And people’s attitude towards non-humans here is the same, even if I introduce myself as a prince! It ranges fr
om tolerating me to outright hating me. At least until I get a student’s badge, that is. And I’ve got fangs, even worse!”

  “And if you don’t get a student’s badge?” Irma asked.

  “They can hang me, but I hope it won’t come to that. They might just show me the way out of town and send me out beyond the city walls.”

  “Well that’s not right. You haven’t done anything, have you?”

  “It’s not that simple. What backwoods did you crawl out of? Have you studied the history of Tantre at least?”

  “No,” she responded in a friendly voice.

  “Four hundred years ago, green orcs besieged Orten. There was a civil war in Tantre, and the greenies decided to grab their piece of the pie. A horde tore into Tantre through the outskirts of the Dead Desert to the north, overturned Liri Meriysky’s forces and drove the Meriysky kingdom to the Stone Age. They emptied Tantre for five hundred leagues inland from the border to the middle provinces and came to Orten’s walls.”

  “Kerr, and the mages’ School? It’s over five hundred years old! Didn’t the mages support the defense?” Rigaud said with concern. He had been listening attentively to the history lesson and was dying to know what happened, just as if it were happening to him personally.

  “Don’t worry, you’re overthinking it! One chronicle suggests there were twenty shamans in the horde, another—over three hundred, which is a pretty good force even by today’s standards. They couldn’t take the city right away; the citizens and the mages had beaten back the attack. They had to fall back and siege the city. The Ort’s channels were blocked off; the orcs flooded all the barge passages with rubble and stones. The city inhabitants weren’t threatened by death from thirst. The Gremuchka didn’t dry up, but hunger was real. The shamans made it impossible to coordinate the attachment for setting teleports and gates, and the city was cut off from a food supply, even through portals. And there you have it,” the group was listening to his every word with open mouths. Yep, these kids haven’t been spoiled with stories. Grabbing his flask from his belt and wetting his dry throat, Andy went on. “Without food, the citizens of Orten began to get hungrier and hungrier. Three months later all the rats and crows in the city had been eaten. Desperate mothers laid their babies in cradles and let them flow down the Ort, hoping kind people further down the river would fish them out and take them in….”

  Here Andy paused. He remembered another city surrounded by enemies. A city where millions of people upheld freedom with their very lives, in the hunger and the cold and under constant bombardment and fire. His grandmother Paula was ten years old in forty-three when the siege of Leningrad ended, and they were taken out through the “Road of Life….”

  “Kerr, don’t stop now. We’d like to know what happened next.”

  “Next? Next, nothing interesting. Half the cradles were intersected by the orcs from their pontoons. Later they found a whole pile of children’s bones.”

  “You mean they—?!” Rigaud began in horror.

  “Yes, Rigaud!” Andy interrupted him. “They ate them, even competed against each other for the scrumptious human children,” he finished. “Mages, too, suffered from hunger and a strong magical exhaustion. Several dozen students had died of hunger and a complete depletion of their magical forces; after all, they got their nourishment from the warriors on the city walls. Ten thousand Orteners had perished, not from wounds. Hunger killed them no worse than a scimitar or orc’s glaive could have. If you happen to be in the middle city, you could visit ‘Hunger corner,’ where there’s a museum of the siege and an illusionogram. I can’t imagine the impression it’ll make on you. The hunger lasted a year.”

  “And then?” Rigaud again answered for the whole group.

  “And then the elves came and attacked the orc camp from the west, and King Olli the Furious’ army came down from the north. Olli broke the coalition between the coastal lords and the White Baronies all to pieces, and hanged over five thousand conspirators in the process. All the rebel leaders were quartered. And now I’ve made my merry way to Orten, not worrying about a sucker punch from a rebel. The union army dealt the orcs a crushing defeat. They pursued the retreating greenies for more than a day, as long as their hasses and horses would carry them. Of the hundred-thousand fold horde, barely a tenth escaped.”

  Andy fell silent again. What had happened here four hundred years ago was totally indescribable. The orcs had overturned the humans’ offensive and broke into the ranks of the elves; magnificent archers and swordsmen, they were unable to succeed in a battle with a conjoint structure. The orcs, in an infantry square formation, covered by their full-length shields and baring their ten-foot-long spikes, trampled most of the elf forces in the mud and seemed unstoppable. The fate of the battle was hanging by a thread. At the most crucial and tragic moment, the city gates opened and the mages of Orten entered the battlefield, covered by their shield bearers. With a ram attack as a “wall of fire,” the mages destroyed the orcs’ central formation. That one attack took the lives of twenty city mages, who gave them up in order to feed the spell with their life force and make it strong. The “wall” was able to kill all the khans, chiefs and commanders of the orc horde. Stripped of their leadership, the horde army fled, which decided their fate.

  “Kerr, that’s horrible,” Marika was actually crying.

  “Why did you think they have such a negative attitude towards non-humans here? Especially the fanged ones. This isn’t your hometown back yard where everyone has equal rights.”

  “As it turns out, your ancestors besieged Orten?” Irma blurted out. Then, realizing the tactless nature of her question, she covered her mouth with her hand. “Oh! … excuse me….”

  “No, Irma, actually, my ancestors did the opposite—they defended the city at the walls. They were humans. I don’t have any orc blood in me. Plenty of another, but orc, not a drop,” Andy answered calmly, mentally drawing a parallel between St. Petersburg, which was called Leningrad during World War Two and underwent a 900-day blockade, and Orten. He transferred one reality to another. Meanwhile, he didn’t delude himself concerning the role of the elves in the city siege. It was a dark, convoluted history, judging by war as a whole. Having once read the “The Siege Chronicles,” he had formed a personal opinion of the past military events. He put all the facts together and decided that the siege had been possible only because of the intrigue of the Forest elves. The pointy-eared ones weakened the humans and the School of Magic at the orcs’ hands, and then showed up as the saviors in a blur of fanfare. Although, Olli the Furious and the elven archers and swordsmen did help a lot. With his excellent understanding of the art of elven war and the motivations of the Forest Lordships, Olli placed the elves in the second row, where, with their strategy, they essentially played the role of cannon fodder. True, their merits were later praised beyond all telling and PR people of the pointy-eared ones earned their bread and butter many times over, making the forest misfits seem all white and fuzzy. And Olli, who lost half his army, had to meet the elves half way. Washing the egg off their face, the Forest Lordships took on the responsibility of building a defensive perimeter on the northern outskirts of the Light Forest. The skunks! The orc infantry marched over the wastelands, while the cavalry on horses and wargs traversed the outskirts of the thickets, avoiding EVERY SINGLE arrow and abatis.

  “Kerr, how is it then that after the siege ended, they continued to accept non-humans into the School, including orcs?” Irma put two and two together. “As far as I understand from my ‘concise history’ book that my tutor taught me, massive pogroms and persecution against orcs began at that time. The rulers of Tantre would give up to twenty silver jangs for a dead orc!”

  “Hm, interesting question. Do you know anything about a mage called Bahig Trekpaly?” Andy asked the whole group. The young people only shook their heads. “Bahig Trekpaly was a gray orc. The gray orcs are so different from the greenies that they don’t consider them equals and have an attitude of contempt towards
them. Just as elves do towards humans. By the time the horde approached the walls of Orten, over three thousand gray orcs had been living in the city and the suburbs. Just over two thousand took refuge outside the city walls. The orcs defended the city on the walls. Ten gray shamans and fifteen gray students of the School beat back the magical attacks of the greenie shamans. But, even though the grays were defending the city and their families, after a year-long siege, people began to take their rage out on any or all fanged creatures. People cried to the grays that their tribesmen were destroying Orten. In order to rehabilitate their good name, Bahig suggested hitting the greenies in the back of the head when they turned away from the walls, and offered to personally ‘ignite’ the spell. All orc students and shamans voluntarily came to his aid.”

  “‘Ignite?’ A ‘wall of fire’ is the enactment of the elemental magic of fire, or am I missing something?” clever Irma again spoke up.

  “The element of fire? Irma, the force of a ‘wall’ would have been so strong, the orcs’ military center would have ceased to exist, along with all the chiefs, officers and mages. That ‘wall’ wasn’t just an enactment of the element of fire,” Andy lowered his voice, choosing his words carefully.

  “Not just an element? What then?” Irma asked, still not satisfied.

  “Bahig conducted the ritual known as ‘melding with an element;’ he melded with fire, which gave it will and intellect for a short time, and nineteen students with their lives and death emanations nourished it with strength. After the victory over the horde, King Olli forbid any mention of the gray orcs’ participation in the battle of Orten, to please the elves. Not one official chronicle contains a mention of Bahig Trekpaly and his contribution to the victory of the military coalition. The elves tried to erase any record of this event and of the ritual itself. Nice guys, huh? Only the School council didn’t forget the truth, and despite the monarch’s will kept the same rules. Any gifted person could pass the entrance exams. Any! In addition to the old rules, the Free Mages’ Guild was charged with defending non-human students and guarding them against encroachments. Because of their decision, rector Olmar was stripped of his nobility and titles, royal favors and privileges, but the rules remained the same. On the other hand, the School received three thousand weighty golden pounds for renovating the campus and hiring new teachers. Interesting, huh? Personally I think it was a combination of multiple political factors that eventually gave the elves the finger.”