The Orc Who Saved Christmas

 The Orc Who Saved Christmas

                Orcs did not celebrate Christmas. This was a fact, one that Darryn had heard shouted at him for much of his adult life. He was only half-Orc, however, his mother being the Orc and his father being the human who lost an unfortunate bet. There was much alcohol involved in Darryn’s conception, and even more of it when they were trying to work out which one of them was going to raise him. He looked more like his father than his mother, which was offensive to half the Orc population at least, and so Darryn was classed as an abomination and handed over to his father to keep. He spent a few years with his father, who spent more time in the mines and the taverns than he did at home, but Darryn learned quickly how to mind himself.

                He also grew quickly, which made his father uncomfortable; a ten year old child as tall and hardy as a forty year old man required explaining, and to keep suspicion off and ridicule away, Darryn’s father taught him to chop wood and sent him to the woods every day. One day, when Darryn returned home from the woods, his father was gone. This would not have been especially remarkable, as his father was seldom around, but this time, his father never came back. Word was that he had got lost in a mining shaft and the knockers carried him off. Others claimed they saw him at the local tavern, telling people to tell others that he had carried off by the knockers and that absolutely no one was to look for him. In either case, Darryn was alone from that day onward. He tried fitting in with other families, but when he grew too large to fit through most front doors, he gave up the hope of having a family and went to make a new life for himself.

                He settled on a small village at the base of a mountain range. There was nothing particularly special about this village or the mountain behind it; he just liked living beside something larger than himself. The village was little more than a market stop, the glen it was nestled in cut off by the mountainside at one end and a slightly overgrown road on the other, the perfect place to be quiet and out of the way. The only difficulty was that all the villagers wanted Darryn out of the way too. When he first came to the village, he realized how much larger he was than everybody else when he saw more eaves than he did faces. He had never seen so many foreheads and wide eyes in his life, everyone craning to stare at him as he went by. He had learned to walk on silent steps due to his father’s constant headache, and tried to make himself smaller everywhere he went, to fit into shops and stoop under stalls, but the villagers either gawked at him or tried to run him out of town, thinking he was an orc from one of the raiding tribes. His skin was the same colour as theirs, his hair was short and black, but his height was concerning, and his muscles looked like they were sitting on other even larger muscles, his life of manual labour doing more for him than he realized. He did what he could to appease their fears by gently introducing himself and offering them presents of kindling and firewood, but his immense stature and small tusks did him no favours. He was run out of the village countless times; it wasn’t the rocks they threw that deterred him—he didn’t feel those, because his muscles received the bounce and just returned it in a threatening ripple—but it was what they said that made him go away.

                “Beast! Animal! Orc filth!”

                He took exception to the last one, because he was careful to bathe every night after a long day of woodcutting. The villagers threw more aspersions than stones, mostly because the insults involved no effort and they were afraid he would sharpen the rocks on his pecs and throw them back. Darryn had his axe, but they didn’t seem to much mind that; they feared only the idea of him being a bestial and vulgar Orc and didn’t want him around long enough to satisfy their hopes. Darryn accepted their judgement of him, decided they were mean people who didn’t know how to pleasant, and went to live on a nearby hillock. He made his house facing the mountain and overlooking the village square, so he could always see what the villagers were up to and feel as though he were a part of whatever they were celebrating. He still went down to the village once in a while, to hear a bit of news and make presents of game and firewood to an old blind widow who worked as a grocer at the end of the long market row. He wore a disguise when he visited, so no one would suspect him of being a filthy Orc and instead just think of him as a rather colourful woodcutter with a woolly beard, his costume made out of old wool and fleece scraps, which the old blind widow thought were ‘very nice indeed’. He hunched himself and hid his tusks, which qualified him as a ‘very nice boy’ or a talking wall, she could not tell which, but he never stayed long, though the old blind widow always liked to have him around because he listened to her and somehow could reach all the high bits of her house without using a ladder. Darryn made sure she never wanted for firewood and that she had a fire on when she needed it, and looked after her as he did look after the rest of the village, from his house perched on the high hill nearby.

                The desperation of wanting to belong and not being able to mend it is a sin, one that haunted Darryn for many a year. The thrum and bustle of the village going on without him plagued his conscience, the seasons passing in a blur of blended time, Darryn celebrating the holidays in his own way by himself, pretending he was celebrating along with them, watching the Christmas tree being erected and then taken down every winter, the many harvests bringing in and being venerated. He could only hope that one day, when the villagers' needed him to take something down from a shelf or fix their thatch or mend a gable, they would come running up to him and invite him to live among them at last. He didn’t intend this as a curse; it was only the wish of a lovelorn heart working on a lifetime of loneliness.

                It took a while, but eventually ill-luck did find its way to the mountain village: a poor crop made food scarce, and an early frost made the villagers want for fires. It was bitterly cold by November, and they had gone through the chief of their firewood before the month was out. Men went off to cut more firewood, but all the best wood was in the woodland behind Darryn’s house, and while they liked slinging axes over their shoulders, they didn’t like trudging up hills much. They didn’t ask how the old blind widow had come by a constant supply of green wood, but they were grateful for her willingness to share, in that they told her they were going to borrow some firewood, and she replied with ‘Oh, isn’t that nice’. Some people thought it was rude to take from a woman who already had so little, but as much of the villagers were frightened by scarcity and less so by a harmless old crone, they saw no problem with taking what wasn’t theirs. Darryn watched them deplete the old lady’s stores and felt sorry for them. He would always bring the old woman more firewood, but he found it amusing that the villagers thought it was better to steal from the blind than it was to accept help from an Orc.

The young girls of the village had better morals, and one of them, who had decided it was wrong to take anything from anybody in a time of need, went out to gather kindling for the village by herself. This was lucky, because she went to gather kindling at the woodland behind Darryn’s house. She had never formally met him, but always heard the villagers talk of him as an enormous snarling beast, one with great horns and claws, whose long reach and underhung jaw meant he could catch you and eat you in one go. She had seen him from afar, walking the brow of the hill and marching into the woods very often. She did see someone coming to visit the old blind widow from time to time, a large someone who paid her for her undesirable potatoes and carrots and fixed the hazel pins in her roof, but she never suspected that a person who could show such selflessness was an ‘enormous snarling beast’. She also had better sense and more curiosity than most people. As a basketweaver, she was expected to be dim-witted and dull, but she was resourceful, so all her natural genius was forgiven.

She took her willow basket and went to collect pine needles and twigs. The woodland behind Darryn’s house was filled with birch and fir trees, and on Christmas Eve, when the villagers were getting ready to settle down to their meager feasts in frigid homes, she marched up the slope of the hill, her knees digging through deep snow, and looked up to see if there was anyone about. The large log cabin nestled in the hilltop was aglow with life, the amber glow from the small fire within, the blue curtains hung in crescents round the window, the eaves wearing their ivy skirts, the lintel decorated with sloe and juniper. The top of the chimney ribboned with smoke, telling her someone was home, but when she looked in the window, she saw no one there. She would have knocked, to ask whether she might intrude upon the woodland, but there was an abundance of pine needles and pine cones strewn about just beyond the house, and as long as she wasn’t cutting any trees or taking any large branches, she didn’t think she would be bothering anyone.

She gathered as much as the snow would allow, though there seemed to be less of it here than in the village below, the canopy of birch and fir in all their crown-shyness having caught much of the fall, their boughs wilting under the weight, the limbs holding up much of what should have been on the ground. She foraged for a few hours, enjoying the fine pinery, but she sometimes thought she saw people standing amongst the trees. She wondered if it was the Orc, but it was just the penitentes, the stiff blades of hardened snow, straight and upright with their faces to the sun. She remained there until the light began to fail. Her basket was about halfway full, the pinecones resting on needles and curled scrolls of birch bark, when she decided to make her way back to the village, to make kindling bundles to give out for Christmas. She was passing the house and thinking about sliding down the hill when she heard a heavy THUNK! behind her. She turned and waded back toward the house. On the far side of the hill, she saw an enormous man mantling over a well-worn stump. He was standing with his back toward her, his muscles shifting like gears, and steam vapouring from his skin. He lifted an axe over his head and sunk it into a thick log.

THUNK!

Darryn removed his axe and let the two pieces of wood split and faint, one to each side. He prepared another log when he heard the tender footfalls of someone small approaching. He turned and saw a young girl standing at his feet, her legs wrapped in wool, her willow basket slung across her back, her eyes wide and sparkling. He put down his axe immediately and stared at her.

 

Read the test of the story on PATREON