Friday Fiction: King Korm (Part 1)

          Korm looked into the wavy running glass of his wonky mirror, a cheap apprentice work that his madra had purchased years ago for a penny. He nervously checked his beard. It was his Third Beard and had come in much thicker than anyone who had seen his wispy First or Second Beard had expected. In fact, it was so long and bushy that it made his skinny profile look uncannily like an upright walking broom. He stroked his whiskers’ bristly length. The beard was problematic.

          Morgs have a complex relationship with their beards. The males calculate their lives’ seven stages by the changes in the growth, and over the ages certain beliefs had sprung up and grown entrenched about what your beard meant about you. Korm had never really given these beliefs much credence, perhaps in part because his sparse early growths had not augured particularly well. And then, almost overnight, this.

Boys who had ignored his puny frame before were suddenly in the mood for a fight, challenging him like young goats ready to butt heads. Girls who had never spared him a second glance now slowed as they passed him by, gazing long and speculatively. Korm flinched under all this attention; he simply didn’t know how to handle the change. Especially because, underneath it all, he knew he was exactly the same Morg that he was before. And it was all going to get worse, he knew, because with the Third Beard came the King’s Camp Service.

Morgs are the farmers of war; they consider, say, an infestation of Ogres as much a nuisance as a plague of locusts, and with as much stolid straightforward facing the problem and weary shouldering of the burden. They have little romance of war but admire a good warrior as they would admire someone who handles the farm well, with care and sacrifice. To this end there is the King’s Camp.

Once the Third Beard was upon you, no matter what pathway of life you chose, there was a year when you left your family, your town, and even all personal possessions behind you and reported to Camp. There were drills, weapons classes, and (the only thing that even vaguely appealed to the scholarly Korm) the history of great wars. The rest of it all sounded as deadly dull as possible to the young Morg, and he tugged his beard in frustration at the thought.

“Now, now, boy, that won’t make it grow any longer, you know. And don’t you think it’s already long enough?”

Korm whirled around at the creaking, unexpected voice, his claws hastily dropping to his side.

“Uncle Akko!” he yelped. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

The elderly Morg waved a fragile, weightless paw dismissively and came tapping all the way into the room, leaning on his curling black cane. His twisted right leg dragged the floor behind him. Technically, Akko was Korm’s grandmother’s cousin; but as their closest living relative he had taken the boy and his mother Tessa under his wing. And now he had even outlived poor Tessa, dead for five years in the last outbreak of Barek’s Breath. Well, perhaps it was the Will of Shyreen. At least, that’s what Akko tried to tell himself during the dark watches of the night.

“I understand, I understand,” he wheezed, moving over and sitting with a sigh on the rumpled bed. “Believe it or not, even an old Witness with a bad leg had his moments of vanity in his youth.”

“It’s not vanity,” Korm began. “Far from it. I just wish everyone would stop looking at me, and … and smirking …” He threw up his hands helplessly.

Akko wagged a crooked forefinger.

“But you can’t tell me that somewhere deep inside there isn’t a part that’s not secretly pretty pleased with yourself, eh?” He laughed at Korm’s dumbfounded look. “Camp will knock some sense into you, though.”

Korm groaned inside.

“And then you can settle down to learning the Way of the Witness in earnest,” the old Morg said, pride in his voice. He rubbed his bad knee mechanically. “I may not have much, but that is one legacy I can hand on to you.”

Korm nearly groaned out loud at that. Being a Life Witness, though a vocation perfectly suited to Akko, did not appeal to the young Morg. He had grown up observing his uncle performing his duties, and while the old fellow derived great emotional satisfaction from the Rituals, Korm felt that there must be more to learn about the world than was contained in the Book of Signs.

Every Morg knew that there were great powers that overlooked their lives. There was the shadowy, all-powerful Morlakar Shyreen, creator and judge. There was Mother Ortha, whose most immediate manifestation was the world itself. There were the Yorn, potent spirits of craft and callings, that aided you in your pathway of life. And there was Mog Gammoth, Father and First of All Morgs, who surely watched over his children.

Every Morg believed this for a certainty. But as these powers were seldom if ever seen, they had Life Witnesses.

Life Witnesses put some skin on their beliefs. A Witness stood in place of any or all these Powers, and in their person presided over the important events of a Morg’s life. A birth, a marriage, a business contract, an oath, even a death was not considered properly accomplished if a Witness didn’t attest to it; if the deed were not appropriately Seen. There were a few Witnesses who through their style and presence had grown rich and patronized in the upper echelons of society. Others were like Uncle Akko.

Everyone, from the King on the White Throne to the beggar in the street, needed a Witness at some time or another. When summoned, a Witness was expected to go, no matter what he was doing. As a boy Korm had accompanied his uncle more than a few times in the dead of night to the home of some wretchedly poor family to greet a squalling red newborn or close someone’s eyes for the last time, and come home with no more than a bag of beans or even (on more than one occasion) a pretty or unusual stone. A Witness had to go, but a Witness had to be paid something, no matter how worthless.

Korm didn’t mind that. The attention and the dignity which Akko gave to each case added a certain nobility to his uncle in his eyes, as if in those moments the old Morg were going beyond himself to serve. If it were allowed, Korm was fairly sure his uncle would do the job for nothing. No, it was something else.

Korm had read the Book of Signs back and forth before he was out of his First Beard. He was precocious that way, and he remembered everything he read. He had found several passages that made no sense to him, and several things that seemed flat out contradictory to his straightforward mind. When he asked his uncle for clarification, Akko had counseled faith and patience, but had no answers. That led Korm to more reading beyond the battered old volume of ritual, and that set the boy on a whole-hearted quest through History.

Korm looked around their shabby apartment. It was far too small now that he had the world in his head. But the schools that taught the knowledge he sought, while quite reasonable, were still far beyond their means. If he could reach a certain level, there were scholarships that could carry him on. But could he even ask his uncle if he might try to pursue it, and break the old Morg’s heart? It was such an easy, easy trade-off: his dreams and the rest of his life for a simple but assured trudge along a steady groove until you laid down in your grave.

There was one good thing about Camp, Korm thought gloomily. It was a nine-month chunk of time that stood between him and a final decision. He groaned now despite himself, quietly.

Uncle Akko reached out a comforting claw and patted the young Morg’s back.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It will all be over soon.”

 

Notes

I loved writing Tales of the Morgs, mostly because I felt I knew Korm and Roth, who starred in most of them, and that I knew the character of the Morgish race instinctively, although I had to write the stories to exactly find out a lot of the details of their lives. I had always had an idea about the cultural significance a Morg's beard had to him, but the idea of Life Witnesses, a semi-religious office, first entered the mythos here.

Korm started out, 45 years or so ago, as basically Cornelius from The Planet of the Apes, scholarly, kind-hearted, and a little timid. He, and his history, have developed since then. Here, in King Korm, we have the earliest look at him as a young Morg trying to figure out his destiny. Next would be Korm’s Master, in which you might say he starts college. In Korm and the Lost Library he goes on an adventure and comes of age. There is a glimpse of him in Thron as one of the old king’s court, and of course he is one of the ‘fellowship’ in the unfinished epic Goldfire. He visits our own world in A Friend You Haven’t Met. As a very old Morg he helps untangle the threads in the The Peculiar Wooing of General Roth. And in Aftermath, he has … moved on.

Which doesn’t mean he won’t appear in any more stories. If I can think of another good one where he fits.