The defining fact of my life has been my propensity to injury. I had a broken arm at birth, broken ribs from the Night of the Double Raid, and that was far from my final injury. I am not a terrible fighter, but I am so prone to hurt that in any altercation, I must devote more of my energies and strategies to remaining unstruck than defeating my opponent. As I write these words now, my hands appear as two spiders creeping across the page. I have broken my fingers more often than I can count, on occasions both dramatic and mundane. Missed sword blows have sent my hand into the armor of my opponent, snapping fingers. A dropped stew pot shattered my fist. After three decades of this, my hands are gnarled roots which I thank whatever gods may be that I am able to still write with, even if my script does look like someone tied a quill to the bill of a chicken and bid it write.
Pride leads me to emphasize my injuries are not due to a complete lack of skill. My father never trained me. He trained Breka until she wept, but never spent an afternoon instructing me in anything until I was an adult. The meaning of his neglect was obvious.
His lieutenant Tarbug taught me much. He came to me on sweltering afternoons, when a thick haze settled over the wastes, and even the blades of the ginny grass seemed to wilt under the weight of the heat. I was an able and eager student. I know how to use sword, bow, and knife. I can fight naked or with armor and shield, and know the best tactics for both. But Tarbug's instruction could not teach my bones to hold fast under a blow, nor my flesh to abide under a blade's bite. I was a scrapper more than a warrior. Not a bad fighter, but far from the best. My sister however, did develop a reputation as a fine fighter.
My reputation was that I was underhanded, and never met the fight I couldn't cheat. It was a reputation which I will admit was not wholly undeserved, and it troubles me, but the truth is that if I was a more honorable fighter I would also be dead. When I think back on my years, it is clear to me that it is better to be disgraced and alive than honorable and dead. Furthermore, I have done other deeds in my time. Righted wrongs, freed slaves, healed feuds, and killed the enemies of my people both on my blade and at my order. Had the thews been stripped from my bones for a new flesh feast, I would not have done those things. And the balance of those deeds must outweigh my dishonors. Mustn't they?
While my sister and I had survived what would come to be called the Night of the Double Raid, but countless other Targalak had not. My father-chief set out that night to find the Kitboog camp and slaughter a number of them, avenging the murder of Bakrot, his wife, and son.
However, the Kitbooga's new chief was a nimble tactician. He anticipated my father's raid in response to the slaughter of Bakrot's family. Some even say he provoked it. On the Night of the Double Raid, he ordered the Kitboog camp struck and marched the tribe into the desert. He then ordered all his warriors out to attack our camp, leaving the safety of their own young and old to distance and the desert.
This boldness forced my father's raiding party into an impossible position. Raiding parties travelled light, without extra provisions or water. The Kitboog camp was an afternoon's march from our own. Why pack more than a bite and guzzle of water?
My father arrived at the site of the Kitbooga's previous encampment and found it deserted. The tents had been struck and the stores taken. The tracks said that the Kitbooga had let out for the desert. My father faced a choice. Set out after the Kitbooga and face the following day amongst the hot sands without adequate water, or turn home. He decided on the latter, hoping that the murder of Bakrot's family had been a parting shot, retribution before the Kitbooga left the Fields of Ozlu forever.
Upon returning to camp, my father learned of our present disaster. The Kitbooga raiders had completely outnumbered the Targalak left to defend the old, the young, and our meager possessions. The Kitbooga attacked from all sides at once, completely overwhelming my brethren. They slaughtered and stole and raped and abducted, slinking away at first light with dozens of our dead piled high on wargs, and dozens of our living in chains.
Three of every four Targalak capable of wielding a sword were dead or kidnapped. It was a disaster, and marked impending doom. If we remained in the Fields of Ozlu, we would be easy pickings for the Kitbooga or another tribe, all of which now outnumbered us greatly. There would be no more raids from the Kitbooga. Rather, once they realized the weakness of our position, there would be a single all-out attack. They would smash us into extinction, ending the line of the Targalak.
And so we Targalak were forced into wandering.
When we were not in the desert, we were always camped in fields which were not our own. It may come as a surprise to an Imperial citizen accustomed to thinking all the territory south of the river as nothing but endless and useless wastes, but the truth is that the fields, hills, and mountains between the river and the desert are packed with ork chiefdoms. Our politics are no less complicated than your own, though they are of smaller scale. You should consider that the Imperial equivalent to the position which the Targalak now found themselves in would be an army forced to abandon its own capital and then its own country due to defeat.
There were constant battles, negotiations, raids, food-shortages, and marches.
I cannot remember a week going by when our fighters did not ride out with swords unsheathed and eager to taste flesh. I cannot remember camping in one place for more than a fortnight. I finished my childhood on the back of a warg, my mother behind me and my sister in front.
Want and danger travelled with the Targalak as surely as our tents, but pleasant memories did pair with the horrors. After digging up the fetid corpse of a foe for a feast, I remember my father standing tall against the sky, heat lightning racing across the desert behind him, the wind rippling the blood on his gory hands, and bringing with it the smell of rain.
Another time, I watched the dawn prowl over the horizon, light rising to ooze through the eastern clouds and singly illuminate each golden blade in a field of ginny grass. The tails leaned into the light, trying to catch what feeble heat they could; the movement was a reminder that what even the Orkish language pretended was a stalk of grass was in fact the tail of a bulbous worm, and provided the base of the ecosystem in the Yellow Wastes. I clung to mother on the back of our warg. The sun was just rising, but we had been suited and riding for hours. A nearby tribe had sworn a black oath that they would murder every last Targalak, leaving not even the meanest of us as a slave. And so my father-chief led us wisely in flight.
When old Zormush died of hunger, and the men and women of the Targalak gathered around his body singing lays from The Song of Turg, as they chopped apart his limbs, hacking away at the joints for a new flesh feast. The women sang high, and the men low, but their words were the same. They rang out sharp and clear in the dark airs and cold emptiness.
One afternoon, on a day so bright with clouds so thin I imagined I could see the sun in the sky, I saw my first slorg. A hush had fallen over the tribe as we marched beside a miserable and brackish river which our wargs occasionally slurped from. We rode behind Bubok the Double-Bladed, who had called his wives and children close around his pack warg, and kept glancing south.
I followed his gaze, and saw what I thought at first to be the peak of a mountain looming over the edge of the horizon. The mound was a black shadow against the pale gray of the wasted sky. I watched, and the mountain shuddered. It hurled itself down into the ground, shooting a shower of dust and rock into the air. The thing crashed down, and a moment later I heard it, echoing like thunder across the wastes. I pointed and said, "Mother what is that?"
She pushed my hand to my side and told me to hush. It was a slorg, she said.
Slorgs to me meant meat. Fresh killed slorg grilled with salt that day, then thick ropy tentacles black with rot and studded with maggots that popped with flavor a week later, when the meat was ripe.
I had not had to ride out against one of them. The absurdity and danger of the task had not yet occurred to me. Orks killing a slorg is as improbable as a cloud of mosquitos slaughtering a human. I was ignorant. And hungry. I asked, "Why don't father and the warriors ride out to meet it?"
My father and the other fighters had just been driven in battle from the spring which was the source of the muddy stream we followed west. No Targalak had fallen, for we had withdrawn, leaving the native tribe to keep their spring in peace, but many of the fighters were injured. My father in particular had suffered a wound to one of his hearts, leaving him woozy, light-headed, and weak. He wore a thick hide strap around his chest to clot the blood, and grimaced as he rode his warg. But to my child's eyes, he was still invincible. The idea that he might die in a raid or hunt was absurd. The clouds in the sky might as well part, or the ground turn to water. Yes, other Targalak could well die in battle, but never my father. He was the chief after all. And, I was told, I would be too someday.
The slorg rolled, its tentacles flailing like naked branches in a stiff wind, and again rammed the ground. A cloud of earth shot up, and the thing began throwing clods and rocks the size of our tents into the air. The rubble rose as though ascending to heaven where, I was told, the slorg had come from. The boulders held at the peak of their arc, and then gently descended, though given the enormous size of all the bodies involved, it was no doubt a trick of the eye.
The slorg must have been many miles away given the distant and muted quality of its thrashings, yet when I held my palm up to the horizon to compare sizes, the slorg was larger than my hand. Citizens of the Empire have long cast doubt on the existence of slorg of truly titanic size. With the greatest land animal found in the demenses of the Empire being the elephant, it was believed that no animal could grow larger because none did. Slavers did return with tales of slorg the size of castles, but their tales were held in disregard because they were not trusted observers. However, with the recent return of Lord Starkweather's expedition, Imperial scholars finally have reputable scientific data on the subject of slorg. And as Lord Starkweather was thrilled to report, slorgs grow to sizes which he could only estimate, as he was not so foolhardy to go near one of such size. (With that in mind, one should revisit the orkish reputation for "cowardice" so commonly held in the Empire. Orks routinely ride against slorgs in force, and lose many warriors slaughtering them.) The skeptic may ask why, if slorgs of such size exist, they do not rampage across the world, throwing down the Empire and making all other creatures shudder under their shadows?
Lord Starkweather provided that answer as well. The slorgs feed only on the ginny grass. Since ginny grass grows only in the wastes, there is no reason for them to ever leave.