Eric Lanke

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

2026-06-08T07:00:00.000-05:00

FARCHRIST TALES

BOOK THREE:

THE UNDERGOD

I took the pendant home and showed it to Otis and my mother, liking its shape and the way it glinted in the sunlight. What followed was as big a shock to me as the medallion was to them. My stepfather took the trinket from me and then violently shook me until I told him where and how I had gotten it. Crying, I told him all I knew. I was spanked and punished, and then Otis lectured me on what the five-pointed star stood for and the dangers of associating with men who bore it as their symbol. I said I was sorry and that I had not known and together, Otis and I, we prayed to Grecolus for forgiveness. The matter was settled, even though I still was not sure exactly what I was asking forgiveness for, and Otis threw the pendant deep into the small copse of trees that grew behind our home. It took a long time, skipping out whenever I had an hour or two of free time, but eventually I found it and secretly hid the medallion in my room.

+ + +

Dinner was, in many ways, not what Brisbane expected it to be. After Smurch had helped him into his robes—Brisbane did not seem able to prevent the service—the half-ork took him directly to the banquet chamber where members of the klatru were already gathering to feast on what was their only meal of the day.

The chamber itself was conveniently located at the other end of the main corridor, opposite the bath chamber, and was by far the largest chamber Brisbane had seen so far. Gigantic might have been an understatement. It was so huge Brisbane could not even guess at its dimensions. It was roughly oval with plenty of exits scattered around the walls and a high, vaulted ceiling. Like the other main chambers in this complex, it was lit with torchlight and, in the very center of the room, a huge stone table stood surrounded by numerous stone benches.

There were several orks already seated at the table, none of whom Brisbane recognized, all dressed in black and drinking from great tankards. Smurch stopped Brisbane at one of the portals into the chamber.

“I am forbidden to enter until the time has come to serve the meal,” the half-ork said. “I must go to the kitchen now. Enjoy your meal, Grum Brisbane.”

Smurch walked quickly away from Brisbane and turned down one of the side tunnels. Brisbane raised a weak hand in a wave and said goodbye to his friend under his breath. Suddenly, he wasn’t so eager to go in there and get his dinner, even though he had eaten nothing but prison rations for the last two days. He took a small cautious step into the chamber and, when none of the orks at the table took notice of him, he took another. Soon he was moving steadily towards the center of the room and he did not stop until one of the orks looked up at him.

Their conversation suddenly went silent and all their heads pivoted up to look upon Brisbane. Brisbane stood frozen in their gazes and, for the briefest of moments, he was deadly sure they were going to rise up and snuff out his life.

“You that human Grum?” the ork who had first noticed him asked.

Brisbane could not find his voice. There were eight orks at the table, all of them larger than Brisbane and all of them more fierce-looking than any creatures he had ever seen. He might have turned and fled in fear if a sarcastic vein in his body hadn’t ballooned up and said to his mind, What the hells kind of question is that, dumb ass? Who else would I be, an unarmed human so deep in the lair of a clan or orks?

“Yes,” Brisbane said finally.

The ork nodded his head and fell back into conversation with his comrades around the table. They were speaking orkish and Brisbane couldn’t help but think they were doing that just to spite him. He still did not feel comfortable enough to go on over and take a seat at the table, a seat Smurch would probably have said he now deserved, so he stood lamely in place and tried to will someone he knew into the room. At this point, he would have even been glad to see Wister.

Fortunately, it was not long before Ternosh entered the chamber with Wister right on his heels. The Grum went over to take his place at the table while Ternosh spotted Brisbane and came over to him.

“Well, Brisbane,” the Grumak said kindly. “I see you are now properly attired. I hope you are taking easily to your new life. I imagine it is quite different from the one you knew before.”

Brisbane was still not used to the Grumak’s friendliness. Until what had happened with the Demosk, Ternosh had seemed ready to gut Brisbane with a paring knife, and now it was all warm greetings and friendly overtures. Brisbane did not trust it.

“Things are going okay,” he said cautiously.

Ternosh actually smiled. “This will be your first dinner with us. I’m glad I have a moment to talk to you a little bit before the meal begins.”

“Go ahead,” Brisbane said.

“You may have noticed,” the Grumak said, “that dinner is the only meal we grugan eat in the day.”

“I have,” Brisbane said as he held his stomach.

Ternosh chuckled. “Yes,” he nodded. “Very good. Perhaps because it is our only meal, it has taken on quite a bit of importance in our lives. It’s more than just a meal, it’s a gathering time, when peers come together to eat, drink, talk, and celebrate. The grugan word for it is draknel.”

“Kind of like a holiday feast every day?”

“Yes,” Ternosh said, sounding surprised. “That is one way of putting it. Now, since this is your first draknel, and you are still learning our customs, I think it would be best if you kept to yourself as much as you can. Eat your fill, by all means, but do not initiate any conversations. If questions are put to you, answer them simply and respectfully, but do not offer any needless information. I am telling you to do this for your own safety. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Brisbane said.

“Fine,” Ternosh said. “When we take our seats at the table, I will sit between you and Wister and you will sit on my left. You may pour yourself some ale and drink it if you wish, but you are not allowed to eat anything until Clan Chief—we call the position Sumak—Tornestor has been seated and has begun to eat. Is that clear?”

Brisbane looked briefly over at the table of orks. Wister was not drinking nor was he conversing with the others.

“I’ll just follow your lead,” Brisbane said. “I won’t do anything unless you do it first.”

The Grumak clapped Brisbane on the shoulder. “That will probably be the best way to handle it. Are you ready?”

“I suppose so,” Brisbane said, not really sure if he was or not.

Ternosh led him over to the table and they took their seats, Brisbane on the Grumak’s left just like he had been told. The black-clad orks were separated away from Brisbane and the red-eyed orks by the many angles cut into the edge of the table. It was a huge sprawling thing, roughly oval but with many sides to it. At one end of it sat a stone chair, not a bench like everyone else was sitting on, but a chair. A throne perhaps, with a high back and regal arms.

Ternosh poured himself a tankard of ale and then poured one for Brisbane. Brisbane took the drink and sipped it, lighting a small fire in his belly and reminding him just how hungry he was. The ale was a fine brew, probably stolen from some merchant on one of the roads, and was much better than the swill Shortwhiskers had taken from the orks on the bank of the Mystic River. They had red eyes on their shields, Brisbane reminded himself. They were members of this clan. When he had first seen their shields, Brisbane had wondered about the great red orbs on them. Now he knew they were representations of the one great unwinking eye of Gruumsh One-Eye, a god Brisbane now had to feign allegiance to. Until he could find Angelika and escape with her, Gildegarde Brisbane III was now Grum Brisbane, wizard and priest-in-training of Gruumsh One-Eye.

A silence fell over the orks at the table. Brisbane looked up and, at one of the many entrances to the chamber, he saw an ork who could only have been Sumak Tornestor.

The chief was huge. His pink pig ears twitched nearly seven feet above the floor and his shoulders stuck out from his neck like the wings of a great bird of prey. Like the orks at the table, he was dressed all in black—black boots, black trousers, and black tunic—but he had a red sash draped over a shoulder that crossed his body on a diagonal. He strode into the room like he owned it which, Brisbane thought, he probably did, followed by two more black-clad orks, these two each with a red stripe on their right sleeves, and sat heavily on the stone chair at what now was no doubt the head of the table. The two orks who followed him sat on benches on either side of the Sumak.

“The Clan of the Red Eye,” Tornestor said in a voice like sandpaper, “extends welcome to Grum Brisbane on the occasion of his first draknel.”

“Welcome,” a chorus of deep voices chanted all around the table.

Ternosh leaned and whispered in Brisbane’s ear. “Say, ‘Thank you all.’”

“Thank you all,” Brisbane said, pitching his voice as low as possible.

Tornestor nodded his head as he appraised Brisbane with his eyes. “And now, before I have the food brought in, does anyone have any statements they wish to make?”

Heads turned back and forth up and down the table. There were perhaps twenty seconds of silence before Wister rose to his feet.

“Grum Wister,” Tornestor said gravely. “You wish to invoke your right of statement. What do you say?”

Brisbane took another sip of his ale and shifted his weight on his bench. He was doing just what Ternosh had warned him to do, minding his own business.

Wister cleared his throat. “I would like to issue a challenge, Sumak Tornestor.”

Mumbles bounced around the table. Tornestor’s brow wrinkled and Brisbane did not think he looked pleased.

“A challenge has not been issued in this hall for quite some time, Grum Wister,” Tornestor said. “But that does not prevent you from issuing one now. You may continue.”

“I do not issue it lightly, Sumak Tornestor,” Wister said. “I have given it a great deal of thought. I have decided I cannot share my position in this clan with a human. I challenge Grum Brisbane.”

Brisbane heard his name called out and saw all the eyes around the table turn to him. He did not know what this challenge meant, but he had the feeling it was not good news.

Ternosh leapt to his feet.

Tornestor turned to his brother. “You have something to say, Grumak Ternosh?”

“I do, Sumak Tornestor.” Ternosh gestured towards Brisbane. “He was sent here by Gruumsh One-Eye. His purpose among us in still unknown, but it must be direfully important for Gruumsh to send a human to do it. We cannot allow him to face Wister, or anyone else, in a challenge. What would happen to us all if Brisbane were to lose? Gruumsh’s purpose would go undone.”

Tornestor faced Wister. “Grum Wister?”

“I have considered this, Sumak Tornestor,” Wister said carefully, “and it means nothing to me. I will not share my position in this clan with a human. My oath to Gruumsh compels me to no other action.”

Brisbane tried to rise to his feet but Ternosh pushed him back down with a hand on his shoulder. He still didn’t know what this was all about, but he was getting tired of the way Wister said human. Brisbane figured Wister had been planning this since he first heard the news about Brisbane. That’s why he was so rude to me in the work chamber. He wants nothing to do with me.

Tornestor rubbed his chin. “Ternosh, did your Demosk say Grum Brisbane was to receive special considerations while he lived among us?”

Ternosh paused. “No, Sumak Tornestor.”

“What exactly did it say about Brisbane?”

Brisbane’s ears perked up. This was exactly what he wanted to know.

“The Demosk said three things about Brisbane,” Ternosh said. “First, it said Brisbane’s blood carried the bane of Gruumsh One-Eye. He can work magic and is entitled to possess the pentacle medallion he wears around his neck. Second, the Demosk said Gruumsh had granted this power to a human because he had a special plan for Brisbane among us. And thirdly, it said Brisbane was to be treated as a member of our clan.”

“That is a bit vague,” Tornestor said.

“Information gathering with my Demosk can be a time-consuming practice,” Ternosh said. “That is all I have had time to discover so far.”

Both Ternosh and Wister were still standing while they argued their cases before Tornestor. All the other orks remained seated, quietly drinking their ale. Brisbane could tell some of them were very interested in how this all turned out. Others, Brisbane felt, could not have cared less about it and were just waiting for their dinner to be served.

“It is my job as Sumak of this clan,” Tornestor said, “to listen to the information my Grumak receives from his Demosk and decide how that information would best serve the clan. Is this not true?”

“Of course it is,” Ternosh admitted.

“Brisbane is to be treated as a member of our clan, the Demosk has said,” Tornestor went on, his brow wrinkling as he forced the logic out of his mouth. “This, I have seen to. His blood bares the bane of Gruumsh One-Eye and, even though he does not have red eyes, I have allowed him to assume the position of Grum among us. This is how any grugan with the power of magic would have been treated. This is just and right.”

Brisbane tried to stand up again but Ternosh firmly pushed him back down on the bench.

“However,” the clan chief said, “the rights of challenge and the pit of combat are also part of our society and Grum Brisbane, as a member of the Clan of the Red Eye, should not be exempt from them. Grum Wister is just in issuing his challenge, his rights shall not be denied because of Brisbane’s mysterious origin, and after this evening’s draknel, in the traditional manner, Wister’s challenge shall be answered.”

Both Wister and Ternosh slowly bowed and then reseated themselves.

“I, Sumak Tornestor, have spoken.”

Tornestor clapped his hands twice and immediately the table erupted again in loud conversations and servants entered the chamber carrying platters of food.

Brisbane turned to Ternosh as a steaming plate of potatoes and vegetables was set near him. “So what was that all about?” he asked the Grumak softly. “What exactly does this challenge mean?”

Ternosh picked a plate off a nearby pile and began to spoon potatoes onto it. “Wister has challenged you to combat. After the draknel, you two will fight and the winner will retain the right to be my Grum.”

The smell of the food was inebriating. Brisbane took a big platter of sliced meat from the ork on his left and began to fill his plate. “And the loser?”

Ternosh spooned some potatoes onto Brisbane’s plate. “The loser will be dead. It is a fight to the death.”

To the death.

Swell.

Brisbane stole a couple of looks at Wister, but the Grum ignored him completely. The ork was of average size for his race, which meant he was about Brisbane’s size. Brisbane may have been somewhat of a giant among humans, but among orks, he was as average as the night was dark. More food was passed around the table and Brisbane continued to pile his plate high with a little bit of everything.

“Do we use weapons or something?” Brisbane asked the Grumak. He hated the thought of hand-to-hand combat to the death. He wasn’t very good at street fighting.

“Armor and weapons,” Ternosh said curtly. “Now shut up and mind your manners.”

By this time, all had their plates full and their forks poised. Brisbane remembered not to start eating until Tornestor did, but the aroma coming off his plate nearly drove him mad. He joined everyone else at the table in silence and in staring at the Sumak.

Tornestor paused for a dramatic moment and then dived into his food. A second later, Brisbane and the other orks did the same. The food was delicious. Brisbane ate with an abandon he was sure Otis would have called gluttonous. Brisbane didn’t care. Let Otis have only six small strips of salty meat for two days and then serve him a feast like this and see how much he ate.

Brisbane devoured helping after helping, but through it all, his thoughts were on the challenge Wister had issued to him. Evidently, it wasn’t an ork’s right to refuse a challenge. At least, no one had asked him if he wanted to pick up the glove Wister had thrown down. But Brisbane guessed that wasn’t important for, even if he had been asked, he would not have turned down Wister’s challenge.

He could not, as Brisbane saw it. If he was ever going to get Angelika back, he had to mold into the society of the clan, and this challenge and the pit of combat, whatever that was, were obviously very important to the life of the klatru. Brisbane could not let himself be excluded from that. Ternosh had seemed displeased with Tornestor’s decision, but Brisbane had heard the reasoning behind it and he agreed with it.

Also, Brisbane knew, Wister’s feelings, his hatred of Brisbane because he was human, could not be a sentiment exclusive to Wister. If Brisbane somehow shirked the challenge, what would the orks who hated him for being human think of him then? Brisbane remembered the faces around the table when Tornestor had been casting judgment on Wister’s challenge—the ones that had seemed lined with concern over whether or not Brisbane would be forced to face the challenge—and he thought he knew which ones resented him on the basis of his position and his race. To face Wister in combat was perhaps to gain respect in their eyes.

But then again, this was not an arm wrestling contest. This was a fight to the death. Ternosh had said the combat would be done with armor and weapons, and Brisbane was glad for that. In his opinion, a sword in his hand increased his odds of winning to a more comfortable margin. If he could somehow use Angelika against Wister, he would have no doubts about winning the contest at all.

Eventually, the meal was finished and servants re-entered the chamber to clear the table. Brisbane saw Smurch was among them, but the half-ork paid no attention to his new master and soon he and the other servants left the chamber with the many dirty dishes and the few leftovers.

Brisbane was full, fuller than he had been in a long time, but he had stayed away from too much ale to keep his head clear in the coming battle. He noticed Wister had done the same. Just as he began to wonder what was going to happen next, Tornestor rose to his feet and addressed the table.

“Gentlemen,” the Sumak said. “In the tradition handed down through generations, a tradition begun in the time Gruumsh One-Eye himself walked the earth, a challenge, a masokom, has been issued by one of our number against another. We have all heard the reasons for this masokom. Are there any here who would deny Grum Wister his right in challenging Grum Brisbane?”

The table was silent.

“Then let us move to the pug-trolang, the pit of combat, to settle this masokom before our own eyes.”

All around the table the orks got to their feet. Brisbane, imitatively, did the same. Tornestor and the two orks with the red stripes on their sleeves began to move towards a wide exit from the room, opposite the one Brisbane had used before the draknel. The other black-clad orks soon followed and, when he was given a little shove from Ternosh, so did Brisbane, the Grumak, and Wister.

Brisbane was not sure what lay in store for him at the pit of combat, the pug-trolang, but he was sure he was doing the right thing in facing Wister. He was confident he could defeat the Grum and he was ready to show the rest of the klatru he wasn’t some puny human they could push around like the ones they kept in the circus wagons on the surface.

+ + +

This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

2026-06-01T07:00:00.000-05:00

Here’s the blurb from the back of my paperback:

Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack onstage during a production of King Lear. That was also the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end.

Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They call themselves the Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who will threaten the tiny band’s existence. And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed.

That accurately describes the book I read and the story that Station Eleven is. But that, strangely, is not what I was told Station Eleven was about.

Station Eleven is copyrighted 2014, but it seems to have really grown to prominence in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. To one extent, that makes sense. It is, after all, about a pandemic, an apocalyptically deadly one, and about the hellscape that comes after.

But in another sense, that doesn’t make any sense, because Station Eleven takes place before and after a deadly pandemic, but it’s not really about the pandemic and the hellscape that follows. It’s really about Arthur Leander and his quest for connection. The pandemic and the hellscape are just the tableau on which that quest takes place.

+ + +

This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

2026-05-25T07:00:00.000-05:00

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date.

+ + +

The new audiobook is Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. Not sure what possessed me to get this one. Fifty bucks and twenty-four cassettes. I hope I like it because I’m going to be listening to it for some time to come.

So far there’s this guy, Ablomski (it’s Russian literature and I’m only listening to it; I’m going to get all the names wrong), who’s had an affair on his wife with their children’s governess, and his friend, Levin, who’s come in from out of town to propose to Ablomski’s wife’s sister. Anna Somebody is coming to visit, but it’s not Anna Karenina. At least not yet. I get the sense that this Anna will become Anna Karenina when she marries another character named Karenin. We’ll see.

The writing is good and in a style that isn’t used much any more. We spend some time inside Ablomski’s head and his sensual-seeking, upper class, unredeeming state of mind is on full display.

+ + +

Levin went ice skating with the woman he intends to propose to -- her name is Kitty -- and although he was filled with love, he had too much self doubt to pop the question. Then he went out to dinner with his friend Ablonski (I think it’s Ablonski, not Ablomski) and Ablonski told him that he thought Kitty would agree to marry him, but only if he hurried up and asked her. Levin has just returned to Moscow after a few years in the country and while he was gone a rival had appeared on Kitty’s horizon. This news both encourages and frightens Levin.

+ + +

Levin proposed in a clumsy fashion to Kitty and, although Kitty’s heart was momentarily filled with joy at receiving a proposal, she realized that she truly loved Vronsky and so turned Levin down. Vronsky himself then makes an appearance, along with Kitty’s mother who openly favors Vronsky over Levin for her daughter’s nuptials. Kitty’s father favors Levin, and he comes in as well.

+ + +

Not sure I’m going to make it through all 24 tapes of Anna Karenina. Much has happened since last time I wrote, but I’m not sure I remember much of it.

Anna Something is Anna Karenina. The Something was evidently her middle name or the feminized version of her father’s name or whatever crazy thing those nutty Russians do. Vronsky has fallen for her but she’s married to a famous guy and has fled back to Petersburg but Vronsky has followed her. Levin has gone back to live in the country. Ablonski and his wife have reconciled, but Ablonski’s eye is starting to wander again. Kitty has gotten sick and she and her family are planning to go abroad to help her recover. The current action is taking place in Petersburg with Anna and Vronsky and the social circles in which they move. Anna finds herself drifting from one circle to another since her return from Moscow, the modern and bohemian suddenly more attractive that the traditional and stodgy.

One thing I do like about the novel is the way the characters lead their separate lives but are all interconnected through love, friendship and/or family relation. It makes me realize how much drama there is in the day-to-day reality of people and their relationships.

+ + +

Lenin and Ablonski argued over Ablonski selling a forest he owned to another guy for what Lenin thought was well below its value. The argument included different perspectives on what it means to be an aristocrat and what it means to be working class, and I could tell that Tolstoy was making commentary on Russian society. I couldn’t tell what the commentary meant -- just like I can never tell what the social commentary means in Russian literature (except for the scene in Crime and Punishment with the old man whipping his lame horse to death; I know what that social commentary meant but only because I read the Cliff Notes) -- but I could tell commentary was being made. Vronsky and Anna have begun an affair and Anna has just told Vronsky that she is pregnant.

+ + +

Long passages in Anna Karenina about Levin and his laborers working in the fields, mowing the grass and bailing the hay. Levin’s half brother has come to the country to stay with Levin, and they have opposite perspectives on the country. To Levin, it is a place free of the corruption of the city, where work can both fortify the body and heal the soul. To the brother, it is a place to relax and do as little as possible. Again, the social commentary is fairly obvious, especially when Levin and his brother get into an argument over some of the social reforms that the brother supports and Levin opposes. Ablonski also wrote and asked Levin to visit his wife Dolly and their country house, where she is staying with the children for the summer. Levin agrees, only to find out after he arrives that Kitty will also be visiting there.

+ + +

Levin is so enamored with the pastoral way of life led by his peasants that he decides to adopt it wholly for himself, but then goes to visit Kitty and is smitten again with her and the “civilized” circles in which she moves. The triangle between Anna, her husband and Vronsky gets more complicated as Vronsky decides that since she is carrying his baby Anna has to leave her husband and pledge her life to him. Karenin decides that he won’t let Anna go because to do so would make her happy and publicly bring scandal down upon his good name, and Anna waffles helplessly in between.

The character study is quite well done, with each set of thoughts and motivations being presented and explained in turn. Tolstoy does a good job making each character’s position seem logical and true given what information they have, but ultimately, each is limited not only by the partial vision each have of the situation, but also by the acts of the other two on which their considerations are only a reaction.

+ + +

Finally finished this audiobook. I did not enjoy it. It was probably a mistake to begin trying to log this one on a day-to-day basis. My god. So much going on. So many characters. No clues as to which ones really matter. Maybe that was the point?

+ + +

This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

2026-05-18T07:00:00.000-05:00

FARCHRIST TALES

BOOK THREE:

THE UNDERGOD

We called the game “kick-the-can,” and I’m sure children have played and will continue to play it for years under that name or under some other simplified nomenclature. I was “it,” and I had just counted up to the mandatory fifty, when I saw the horse-drawn wagon come crawling down the street. The man who drove it was still young, but obviously an adult, and he wore red clothes and a black beard. Behind him, the wagon absolutely tottered with piles of books and boxes, loosely held together with a piece of tarpaulin. The man stopped the cart right beside me, in front of a house that had been vacant for months and whose yard my friends and I had been using as a playground of sorts. He asked me for some help in unloading his wagon. Without much thought I agreed, figuring his books and boxes might be more interesting than another round of kick-the-can. He asked me my name and I said Gil. I asked him his and he said Roy. When the work was finished, and I had seen dozens of things that made my eyes swim with fascination, the man took me aside and pressed a small silver pentacle medallion into my palm.

+ + +

Brisbane did his best to make out Ternosh’s vague form as they walked down the dark tunnel. Every once and a while, he would unconsciously slow down and Vrak would give him an angry shove from behind. In that way, at least, it seemed like old times.

“As I said before,” Ternosh said as he led the way into the ork tunnels, “I pretend to neither understand nor agree with the information I have received from my Demosk, but I do not for a moment doubt its veracity, nor will I shirk my obvious responsibility in the matter.”

Brisbane noticed how talkative Ternosh was being. He decided to try and take advantage of it. “Just what exactly did your Demosk tell you this time?”

Ternosh turned down a side passage and Brisbane quickly followed him, eager to hear anything the ork might say. Ternosh was silent for a moment before he answered.

“I might as well tell you, I suppose. I’m going to have to tell you quite a bit I’d really rather not tell you before this is all over.” Ternosh continued his fast pace down the tunnels and into the earth as he spoke loudly enough for Brisbane to hear. “My Demosk again asserted the bane of He-Who-Watches was in your blood and he also revealed something about his intentions in granting you such a responsibility. I was told even if given the chance, you would not flee from the settlement because you had a job of sorts to do here. I admit I do not know what this job is. I was also told you were to be treated like any other Grum, or Grumak-in-training. This I will do even though I do not know what will possibly result from it.”

Ternosh continued to lead the way through the countless tunnels and corridors. Brisbane was not sure if he was being taken to the same chamber he had been to before, but he did not think so. His eyes were beginning to adjust to the darkness and occasionally they would pass near a room or through a corridor that was lit by torchlight.

“Other than that,” Ternosh went on, “I really am not yet sure what He-Who-Watches, Or Gruumsh One-Eye as I am now allowed to refer to him as in your presence, has in store for you. I do know I will continue to ask my Demosk for information, but that can often be slow going. Whatever reason Gruumsh has for this situation, it must be unusual and very important for him to go to these extreme measures.”

Shortly the small party arrived at a small chamber that seemed to be a laboratory of sorts. It was lit by torches and contained workbenches covered with books, glassware filled with liquids, and jars filled with solid ingredients. A single ork stood at one of the workbenches, dressed in red robes like the ones worn by Ternosh, except his had white stripes running down the sleeves and wide white streaks in the folds that fell beneath the waist. The ork seemed busy at working with the liquids and glassware. When he turned to meet the group entering the chamber, Brisbane noticed he had two red eyes.

Ternosh turned to face Brisbane and saw Vrak standing there behind the human. He raised his voice in several curt orders and Vrak quickly turned and fled from the chamber.

“I’m afraid Vrak has not yet accepted the fact that you are no longer a prisoner. It is a problem you are likely to have with the majority of us. I will do as I am told, but I cannot force anyone to treat you cordially. Wister?”

Ternosh addressed the ork in the red and white robes and he stopped his work to come over by the pair at the doorway.

“Brisbane,” Ternosh said, “this is Wister, a Grum like you. I have already discussed your new position with him and, as I am needed elsewhere at the moment, he will have to continue with your indoctrination into our ways.”

Brisbane looked at Wister and nodded his head. “Hello.”

Wister said nothing and turned his red eyes away from Brisbane.

“By the way,” Ternosh cut in. “My name is Ternosh.”

“I know,” Brisbane said, trying not to feel insulted by Wister’s rudeness.

“You know?” Ternosh said, his brow wrinkling. “How would you know that?”

Brisbane did not want to go into what had happened between Smurch and himself. “I heard your Demosk call you Grumak Ternosh. I knew Grumak was your title, so I figured Ternosh was your name.”

Ternosh seemed puzzled. “You can speak our language? That of the grugan?”

“No,” Brisbane said honestly. “The Demosk was speaking the common tongue.”

“You heard your own language?”

“Yes,” Brisbane said.

“Fascinating,” Ternosh said. “This is something I will have to look into.” He snapped out of his puzzlement. “Oh well, no matter, I must be off. I will leave you in Wister’s capable hands.”

Ternosh turned to leave but before he had gone a full step he stopped and turned back. “Oh, Brisbane. Now that you are a member of the klatru, our upper class, you have the right to retain a personal servant. Shall I assign you one or do what want someone in particular?”

“What do you mean?” Brisbane asked.

“Well,” Ternosh said, “if you wanted to pick Vrak or someone else in the party that captured you, they would have no choice in the matter. They would be forced to serve you.”

Brisbane thought about it. “No,” he said. “I’m not going to make any friends that way.”

Ternosh nodded and then focused his attention on the side of Brisbane’s neck. The Grumak reached out and tore off the healing patch he had placed there. Brisbane’s hand went up to his neck and he could feel no trace of a scab or scar.

“So,” Ternosh said. “I’ll just assign you someone.”

“No, wait a minute,” Brisbane said. “Smurch. I would like Smurch to be my personal servant.”

Ternosh looked at him oddly but he eventually nodded his head. “Fine. I’ll have him sent down. Now, I really am leaving. Brisbane, Wister, I’ll see you both at dinner.”

Ternosh spun and this time he did leave the chamber. Brisbane watched him go and when he turned back to the chamber he saw Wister had returned to his workbench. The ork was mixing liquids together in exact amounts.

Brisbane slowly went over to Wister’s work table. It was cluttered with an array of various-sized bottles, but a small work area had been cleared in front of Wister. The ork had a large book open before him and a large vessel in which he was mixing small amounts of the different liquids. Brisbane heard a squeak and amidst all the bottles he saw a small wire cage holding a large black rat. The rat’s body filled the entire cage and left no room for the animal to move around.

“What are you doing?” Brisbane asked.

Wister said nothing. When he had mixed his ingredients to the proper amount, he picked up what appeared to be a small arrowhead on a stick and began to dunk the barb into the mixture he had created. The potion was syrupy and it clung to the arrowhead like glue. When Wister had the point coated with the substance, he brought the small weapon to bear on the rat’s cage. The ork quickly struck the arrow in between two of the bars and into the hide of the rodent.

Brisbane stepped up next to Wister. “What are you doing?”

Wister put out an arm to keep Brisbane away from the rat. The ork kept his eyes on the animal in the cage and Brisbane could do nothing else but watch.

The rat, which had squeaked loudly when the arrow had pierced it, was now silent and stood on shaky feet with its beady black eyes wide open. The wound in its side was not great, and it appeared the sticky potion had actually stopped some of the bleeding, but the rat did not look well. Its whole body was quivering now with rapid muscle spasms and in a short period of time it fell over and stopped moving altogether.

“Is it dead?” Brisbane asked.

Wister still said nothing. Completely ignoring Brisbane, he picked up a quill pen and began to make notes in the book that lay open before him. The script he wrote in was both strange and somewhat familiar to Brisbane.

Poison, Brisbane thought. It must be some kind of poison. Killed that rat quick and easy. Is that what this Wister is doing here? Developing different kinds of poison?

Brisbane decided to try one more time. “Is that some kind of poison?”

To Wister, it must have been like Brisbane was not even there. For a moment, Brisbane considered Wister might in fact be deaf, but he quickly dismissed the idea. Ternosh would have told him that, he thought, and besides, Wister had not only not spoken to him, the ork had paid him no attention whatsoever.

To the hells with him, Brisbane thought. If that’s the way he wants to be—fine. Brisbane could play that game, too. He stepped away from Wister and began to move around the chamber, looking at the other work tables and the things on them. They were all similar to Wister’s table and Brisbane quickly lost interest in them because nothing was being worked on at them. He wasn’t about to go wandering around in the dark tunnels, so it seemed he would have to sit and wait for something to happen. Brisbane squatted down against one of the walls and did just that.

He began to turn the situation over in his mind. He did feel more in control than he had in his cage, but he was in no way near to having control over it. There were still a lot of things that were up in the air, things he didn’t understand, and things of which he wasn’t sure.

What exactly had the Demosk told Ternosh about him? The Grumak had acted like he was coming clean with Brisbane, but Brisbane doubted Ternosh would actually tell him everything he knew. Brisbane could not forget the countless faces that had passed by his cage earlier that day. Whatever was going on, as Ternosh had said, it was not a normal situation. Traditions were going to be suspended, policies changed, and feelings hurt. He was going to have to tread very lightly if he wanted to make any progress.

Brisbane was playing along with this charade just long enough for him to get Angelika back. He knew that on the surface, but he still did not fully understand the deep down importance of such an action. To him it was a rational decision, he figured as long as he still had his life, he had a chance to steal back his sword from the orks. The thought that in his quest for Angelika he might very well lose the life Ternosh had granted him had never occurred to him, nor did the thought that the decision to stay might not have really been his.

Thoughts of Angelika made Brisbane realize he was now in the same caves in which he had seen Vrak take his sword and he may, in fact, be close enough to her to re-establish contact. He didn’t seem to have anything else to do—Wister was still working at his table, oblivious to Brisbane—so he closed his eyes and opened his mind, reaching out in all directions for her.

And ever so quietly, behind all his brain’s activity, underneath even the currents that beat his heart and digested his food, Brisbane could hear that soft, seductive voice he had longed for so much.

—Brisbane? Is that you?—

Brisbane’s heart raced. Angelika! Yes, it’s me. Where are you?

—I am nearby, young Brisbane. I am glad you have found me.—

Where are you? I’ll come and get you right now.

—No. Remember what I have told you. We have the chance to do great good in this den of evil. Be patient and be strong. Vengeance shall be ours.—

Angelika. I’ve missed you so.

—As I have missed you, young Brisbane. Never before have I been wielded by someone with such potential. Our conquests will be written in the Book of Time. Together we will destroy terrible evil. I yearn for our next battle.—

Angelika’s words left Brisbane a little empty. No, Angelika. I need you. I’ve missed you. I’ve missed your voice in my head.

—Be patient and be strong. In your hands, I shall draw evil blood again.—

Angelika?

Her voice was gone. Brisbane felt unusually uneasy. Normally, a little discussion with Angelika would have supported him, given him a boost of confidence to continue facing the odds in such an unfriendly situation. But this time, her voice left him feeling just the opposite. He felt a little bit more alone in his strife, a little less confident, and a little less able to deal with the mess his life had become. It was a feeling he tried not to dwell on. He tried to reassure himself, forcing himself to be nurtured by Angelika’s words, and tried to forget he had never had to force himself before.

There was a noise at the entrance of the chamber, someone clearing their throat in order to draw attention to themselves. Brisbane opened his eyes to see Smurch standing there, dressed in his plain gray clothing. Brisbane quickly got to his feet and went over to his friend. Wister took no notice of them.

“Jack,” Brisbane said in a low voice. “It’s good to see you again.”

Brisbane extended his arm for a handshake but Smurch ignored it. Instead, the half-ork bowed respectfully.

“I am honored,” Smurch said to the floor, “that you have chosen me, Grum Brisbane. I pledge myself and my service to you until such time as you deem it unnecessary.” He slowly straightened back up.

Brisbane tried not to blush. He looked over at Wister and spoke in an even lower voice. “Is there somewhere we can go for some privacy?”

Smurch answered in monotone. “I can show you to your chamber, if that’s what you mean.”

Brisbane turned back to his servant and nodded. “Let’s go.”

Smurch did not move. “Grum Wister,” he said to the ork in the red and white robes. “Do you have any further need of Grum Brisbane?”

Wister did not turn around. He continued his work, mixing different liquids together to make strange potions. Brisbane heard the ork speak for the first time.

“No.”

“Then I shall take him to his chamber,” Smurch said.

The half-ork turned and left the room. Brisbane quickly followed him. They walked down many of the twisting tunnels and Brisbane made a mental note that sometime soon he was going to have to learn the layout of these caverns. He couldn’t very well have Smurch take him everywhere he wanted to go. Brisbane tried to memorize the way from the work chamber to his personal one, but there were so many twists and turns he would not have bet on his ability to find his way back.

Finally, they came to a small corridor branching off one of the main tunnels. It went back about twenty feet and ended in a portal with a dark curtain hanging in it. Next to the portal, in a wall bracket, was a burning torch and under the torch, carved into the wall, was a large cubbyhole, about big enough for a man to lie down in. The floor of the cubbyhole was blanketed with thick animal furs.

Smurch stopped and pulled aside the dark curtain. Brisbane could see a roughly square chamber about twenty feet across. In the center of the room was a low table, and on the table was what appeared to be an oil lantern. A crude bed sat against one wall, a well-worn mattress laying on a wooden rack to keep it off the floor and heaped with old blankets and furs. The room appeared to be otherwise empty.

“This is it,” Smurch said as he went in and set about to lighting the lantern.

Brisbane stepped in and let the curtain swing shut behind him. “A bit frugal, isn’t it, Jack?”

Smurch was getting a warm glow from the lantern. “Only the Grumak and the Sumak have finer accommodations, Grum Brisbane.”

“Jack,” Brisbane said. “You don’t have to be so formal with me.”

Smurch stood up and looked at Brisbane. “Are you not my master? Have you changed your mind? Are you going to choose another to be your servant?”

“No, dammit, I’m not going to choose another. I chose you because I wanted someone I could talk to.”

“I will obey your every command,” Smurch said.

“That’s not what I mean and you know it.”

Smurch made a face as if he was trying to think. “Grum Brisbane, I must treat you with due respect in the presence of others. If I do not, you will become a laughing-stock among the klatru. They will think you are unable to control your own servant.”

Brisbane nodded. “Okay, fine. But we’re alone now. I want you to drop this ‘Grum Brisbane’ horseshit. My name is Gil.”

“Is this an order?”

“If it has to be,” Brisbane said. “If that is the only way I can get you to treat me as an equal.”

Smurch’s eyes went wide. “Grum Brisbane, we can never be equals.”

Brisbane shook his head in frustration. “Then how about friends?”

Smurch did not say anything, but the look on his face was not promising. Brisbane’s stomach suddenly rumbled loud enough for Smurch to hear it.

“Dinner is less than an hour away,” the half-ork said. “If you do not wish to wait until then, I can send for some food to be brought here.”

Brisbane shook his head. In a strange way, he had almost become accustomed to his hunger.

Almost.

“I guess I can wait,” he said. “What else is there to do?”

Smurch looked shocked. “You may do whatever you wish. You are Grum Brisbane.”

Brisbane was really getting sick of that. “What would you suggest I do with my time?” he snapped.

Smurch sniffed the air. “Well,” the half-ork said slowly. “No disrespect intended, but it would not be proper for you to show up in the banquet chamber smelling the way you do. As a member of the klatru, it is now your privilege and duty to bathe regularly.”

Brisbane lifted his arm and took a whiff. “I am a little ripe,” he said after his eyes stopped watering. “It’s been quite a while since I’ve had a bath.”

Smurch nodded. “Shall I take you to the bath chamber?”

“This place sure does seem to have a lot of chambers.”

Smurch said nothing to that.

“Yes,” Brisbane sighed. “Please do.”

Smurch extinguished the lantern and then led Brisbane out of his personal chamber. They turned down the main corridor and began to make their way to one of its ends. Small tunnels branched off the corridor at regular intervals, all of them ending in torchlight and a dark curtain. Brisbane could only assume these were more living quarters for other members of the klatru.

When they reached the end of the corridor, Smurch led Brisbane into another lit chamber. High up on one of the walls, a spout of clear water tumbled out a rough crack in the stone and fell to gather in a large pool that dominated the floor of the room. Next to the pool, freakish and out of place in the rough stone cavern, was a small wooden towel rack, like you would expect to find in someone’s home, stuffed with towels and cakes of soap on a small shelf.

Brisbane looked at all the water before him and had to decide whether he was going to drink it or bathe in it. Both, he decided liberally. I’ll drink from the spout and bathe in the pool.

Smurch was at his elbow. “Would you like me to bathe you, Grum Brisbane?”

“No,” Brisbane said, laughing inwardly at the idea. “There are still some things I prefer to do myself.”

“I understand,” Smurch said. “With your permission, I will go and procure some clean garments for you to wear.”

Brisbane nodded. “That will be fine, Jack. Thank you.”

Smurch stiffened. “I will be back shortly,” he said. “Enjoy your bath, Grum Brisbane.”

“Gil,” Brisbane corrected him, but the half-ork had already turned to leave the chamber.

Brisbane began to remove his clothing. He was still wearing his tanned leather pants and the blue tunic his mother had made for him, but they were filthy, caked with mud and waste. Wash them, he thought. I’ll wash them, too. Smurch was going to bring him new clothes, but he still did not want to get rid of his old ones. He could still remember his mother’s hands as she had stitched the tunic together and had put the gold needlework around the collar. Brisbane put the tunic and the trousers carefully by the side of the pool and removed the tattered remains of his underclothing.

When he was naked, he found some stone steps leading down into the pool and he slowly immersed himself in the water. It was warm and only about waist deep, but Brisbane dunked himself down all the way, and he stayed under for as long as he could hold his breath. He felt good under the water like that, better than he had in a long time. His body was buoyed in the water and it felt like he had left the confines of the earth and was floating in some thick soup that existed between the stars. His eyes were closed so he could see nothing and the only sound he heard was the muffled rumble of water falling into the pool.

When his breath ran out on him, Brisbane resurfaced. He moved over to the rack to get some soap and he began to wash himself. He soaped up and then moved over to the waterfall to rinse off. He turned his face up into the spray and let the water cascade down around him. He took a drink and, although the water was warm, it was clean and refreshing.

Brisbane surveyed his own body as he washed it. The effects of his injuries were diminishing—the swelling on his face had gone down considerably and his abdomen was only a little tender to the touch. This pleased him, the fact that he was healing, but there was something else that disturbed him. His eyes saw a body that was much thinner than the one he had known before. His muscles were noticeably, perhaps only to him, smaller and there seemed to be less fat padding them. He looked hardened, more angular, and different. It was as if he was slowly changing into something else and these were the first steps in the metamorphosis.

Brisbane tried not to think about it. He was a member of the klatru now and, along with bathing, he was sure to get all the food he could ask for. Smurch had said dinner was less than an hour away. Brisbane would then see to putting some meat back on his bones.

He continued his bath, washing out his hair and his clothes when he had removed the grime from his skin. He felt refreshed and invigorated when Smurch returned with his new clothes, red and white robes like the ones Wister had worn. Brisbane felt ready to eat an entire horse at dinner.

Smurch offered to towel dry Grum Brisbane.

Brisbane refused him.

+ + +

This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

The Regulators by Richard Bachman

2026-05-11T07:00:00.000-05:00

Richard Bachman is a pseudonym used by Stephen King, initially, I think, so that he could write and publish works out of type from that which made him most famous. Or maybe they’re the stuff he wrote before he became famous. Not sure, but in my experience, the Bachman novels are some of the most typical Stephen King novels around.

And The Regulators is not a good example of that type. It’s a bit of a mess -- with too many characters to keep track of; long on gore and short on psychological horror.

Johnny sees everything, hears everything, feels everything; input floods him and his mind insists on lining up each crazy increment, as if something coherent were happening here, something which could actually be narrated.

This is on page 71 (of 489), and even by then I had had enough. Are you trying to tell us something, Bachman? Is something coherent happening here? Is this something which can actually be narrated? It sure doesn’t seem that way to me.

And then there are long stretches of the story that are told in newspaper clippings or as entries in someone’s journal. In order to add to the realism, press clippings are shown as mocked-up newspaper articles, and the journal entries are set in a script-style font.

Sometimes he goes into the den to watch TV, but not even Bonanza held him long today.

Do you see what happened there? Bonanza is the title of a TV show, and so it is properly italicized or underlined when shown in print. Many computer programs “know” this, and can add that feature automatically. You know who else knows that? Book authors and editors, generally speaking. But you know who doesn’t know that? Most people when they’re writing in their journals. And those journal writers who do know that, probably wouldn’t bother to underline Bonanza in their entry about how their son had been possessed by a malevolent spirit.

Later on, this happens.

A little old for that, but it must have been a bad morning at chez Hobart.

Chez. You know, French for “at the house of.” And you know, that’s a foreign word, so it is properly italicized in straight text, or underlined in italicized text. That’s definitely that kind of thing your average journal writer would do. To underscore their sarcasm, I guess?

Look, it’s a nitpick, I know, but it really destroyed the whole gimmick of the journal entries for me. They were supposed to seem real, but every time something was underlined, all it told me was that it wasn’t real.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

2026-05-04T07:00:00.000-05:00

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date.

+ + +

So I read this book called Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. It was the first selection in an online book club I got exposed to at work. It’s work-related so I don’t think I’m going to specifically track it here, but I did have a personal reaction that I would like to mention.

The book is about the snap judgments we all make in the blink of an eye and about how some of them are amazingly accurate, about how some are downright wrong, and the physiological and observable differences between the two.

One chapter is about cops, and about how they are trained to avoid stressful situations, because a highly-stressed state of mind is one of those physiological conditions which make our snap judgments go bad. It made me think of a novel I would like to write. Something about cops and their “good guy/bad guy” view of the world and how it leads to more not less confrontation and violence.

Blink talks about how police departments across the country are eliminating the option of chasing suspects who run, not because it’s dangerous to civilians (which, if in cars, it is) but because it produces a hyper-stressed state in the police officers and destroys their ability to make good snap judgments. That’s why so many chases end in gunplay. He was going for his gun. I swear he was.

Blink tells one story about a cop who chased someone who ran, and when he finally got them to pull over, he broke every regulation about how to approach a suspicious person on a traffic stop and wound up killing the driver, convinced he was pulling a gun on him. Look, he complained during the investigation, being a cop is hard. I put my life on the line every night and I couldn’t take the chance and let the guy pull his gun on me. It was either him or me.

Which, Blink points out, is all bullshit, because the cop used poor judgment and violated procedure to put himself in that situation. If he had shone his high beams on the suspect’s mirrors, kept himself behind the driver’s left shoulder with the car’s door post always between them, and shone his flashlight on the suspect’s hands -- all as he had been trained to do -- he never would have “seen” a gun (there wasn’t one) and never would have shot the suspect.

At the same time, the cop’s actions were not part of some racist attitude, even though he was white and the suspect in question was black, so that usual refrain is also faulty. His snap judgment that the suspect had a gun was based partially on his perception of him as a black man and the stereotypical associations our culture has pummeled into him his whole life, but no more or less than any other white person in the society. His action was not a result of his individual racism, but more of a cultural racism, and in his highly-stressed condition and in the milliseconds he had to make the decision, he could no more control his ingrained associations than he could control his heart rate.

This is the story I want to write. The cop, steeped in his “bad guy out to get me” view of the world and the victim, in the wrong but not deserving to be killed, moving slowly towards each other until they collide in this three second encounter that leaves one of them dead and the other forever changed.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

CHAPTER THIRTY

2026-04-27T07:00:00.000-05:00

FARCHRIST TALES

BOOK THREE:

THE UNDERGOD

The day Otis Parkinson became my stepfather was the same day I began my study and worship of the great god humans call Grecolus. I was given a leather-bound copy of the Scriptures, the holy writings of the ancient prophets, and I was quickly taught to read it. I was instructed in the creation of the world, the mandates Grecolus had set down for his followers to live their lives by, and the promise of eternal life for those who remained faithful to him. These things were good, and in my innocence, I believed them with all my heart. But even before the seeds of doubt began to germinate in the topsoil of my consciousness, I recognized that life and death under the law of Grecolus was a structured framework, without room for experimentation or oddity. And at the center of it all, was the undying assertion that Grecolus was the only true god. His story of creation left no room for other gods, because Grecolus had created everything, including it seemed, himself. One of his mandates forbid the worship of false gods. The promise of eternal life in the heavens was revoked for all who did not worship Grecolus. To me, even at that young age, it was all an argument between the acceptance of ultimate truth and the openness to listen to other points of view. The Grecolus-driven universe was indeed the only way to go if it was true, but if it was not, the rejection of such diversity to me seemed unhealthy and cruel.

+ + +

Vrak returned Brisbane to his cage, after threading him through the countless tunnels of the ork cave, and Brisbane spent the entire day wallowing in the dirty straw with his two faithful companions, pain and hunger. Before the day was over, the need for a bowel movement came upon him and, unlike urination—which he could direct out of his living space—he was forced to squat in one of the corners of the wagon and leave his refuse of the floor. When finished, he kicked most of the mess out through the bars and scrubbed the fouled area with generous handfuls of straw. He had never felt so low and depraved in his life and could see no difference between himself and the animals that must have once done the same thing in the cage. It was the orks who had done this to him, and Brisbane hung tenaciously to Angelika’s promise of vengeance.

Angelika. Where was she now? Brisbane tried again to contact her but his second attempt was as futile as his first had been. He had seen Vrak take her inside the cave, but Brisbane supposed he could not be sure she was still in there. Vrak had not been able to draw her from her scabbard, Brisbane remembered, and Angelika had said none of the orks would be able to do so. This surely would arouse the curiosity of the orks, to say nothing of the fact that she was found on the person of history’s first human Grumak or, perhaps most importantly, she had an emerald the size of a fist embedded in her pommel.

But, as Brisbane was to find out that day, Angelika was not the only recipient of the orks’ curiosity. Word had evidently spread about the Demosk’s judgment of his blood, and it seemed the whole of the ork encampment passed by Brisbane’s cage that day to catch a glimpse of such a miraculous being. Men in armor and red-eye shields, women with dirty tunics pulled tightly over their large breasts, children with spindly little legs and fingers in their noses—they all came to see the human whose blood bore the bane of Gruumsh One-Eye.

Brisbane did not believe his power came from Gruumsh One-Eye any more than he believed it came from Damaleous. His power came from within himself, as Roystnof had taught him, and the only reason he was not more skillful with his power was because he had not spent enough time mastering it. He was nothing special. All these people, eyes wide with wonder and amazement, who passed by his cage in an endless procession needed to look no farther than themselves to see what they had come to see in Brisbane.

It was a day that passed slowly and during which Brisbane found it difficult to think clearly. The orks—there seemed to be so many of them—passed by with such reverence and awe that it distracted Brisbane and kept his mind from settling down on one idea for long scrutiny. Throughout the day his thoughts passed over many things, maybe as many things as orks that passed by his cage. He thought about his life, the important and not-so-important events that had led up to the situation in which he now found himself.

He thought about Otis, the man who had married his mother and raised him as if he were his own son. He remembered the lessons and the moral training and the occasional spankings, yes, but he also remembered other things, things he had not thought about for quite some time. Brisbane remembered the times they had spent together, not as teacher and student, but as father and son. They had played games together. Otis had been a big fan of card games and had taught young Brisbane just about every kind there was at one time or another. Cribbage was Otis’ favorite and he was very good at it. The day in which Brisbane had finally beaten his stepfather, after years of loss after loss, came flooding back in memory to him now. Brisbane had counted his crib and triumphantly moved his peg into the 121st hole, winning the game. He had looked up at Otis, a smile straining the edges of his small face, and Otis had smiled warmly back at him. Otis had congratulated him and then slyly asked if Brisbane had ever heard of a game called euchre. Brisbane had always known the reason Otis had been strict and sometimes cruel was that he had loved his mother and him like the family they were, but it wasn’t until now, dirty and starving in a broken-down circus wagon, that he realized how much he had loved Otis, too.

He thought about his mother, a woman of impossible beauty named Amanda who had birthed him. Brisbane had many memories about his mother, most of them warm and happy and nurturing, but ever since that fateful day just after his eighteenth birthday

—I’m nineteen now and this December I’ll be twenty—

all his memories had been tainted with the inevitable fact of her weakened death. Somewhere in the mists of his recollection Brisbane could bring up, when he closed his eyes and shut out all other thoughts, the dimmest memory of himself as an infant, teething and drawing milk from his mother’s swollen breast. But even that was ruined by the stigma of her death, for he knew the suckling flow had stopped completely and her breasts, once so full and smooth and round, had drooped and wrinkled with age and disease and were now withering into dry dust in her grave. He missed her so much and it was times like this that he wondered how he could go on living without her. How could he go on for such long periods of time without thinking about her and all she meant to him?

He thought about Roystnof, his oldest friend who he had known for six years as Roy Stonerow. Roystnof was one of his teachers, too, like Otis, and also like Otis, Roystnof was also something more. Brisbane loved him like a brother and felt the separation from him perhaps more than anyone else. Roystnof was a source of other ideas, ideas different from those set down as law by Grecolus, and may therefore have been more appealing to the rebellious Brisbane approaching his adolescence. Roystnof’s world was a world without gods and without the guilt and sacrifices that gods seemed to need when they lived among men. In Roystnof’s world, man was the master of his own destiny and it was his choice to do what he willed with his life. Death was an ending in Roystnof’s world, not a beginning, and when it found you, all that was left of you were your works and the memories of you in others. It was a less comforting world, a world in which mortal meant mortal, but through his experiences with Roystnof, Brisbane had come to suspect it was the only kind of world that made any sense.

He thought about Shortwhiskers, the dwarf who had come into his life one night and shown him a wizard named Roystnof where he had previously seen a friend called Roy Stonerow. The dwarf had also shown him another world, not the one of Moradin and Abbathor and of the dwarven myths, but the one of stalwart adventure, a man and his sword out to win fame and fortune. A world Nog Shortwhiskers had known for longer than Brisbane had been alive, a world he had shared with his friend Roystnof and his grandfather Gildegarde Brisbane. The dwarf had become such a part of his life. They were friends, yes, but they were also something more than that. They were companions in battle. Together they had faced and defeated orks, ogres, ettins, and a demon. There was a special kind of bond forged there, different from the one that attached him to Roystnof, but strong and binding all the same. In the heat of battle, Brisbane had and would again flagrantly risk his own life to protect Shortwhiskers’, as he knew the dwarf had and would do for him.

He thought about Stargazer, the half-elven woman he had first seen in the town square of Queensburg on the eve of the festival of Whiteshine. Brisbane closed his eyes and tried to remember her beauty through the ugly images that had dominated his life since his capture on the banks of the Mystic. He loved her, he could feel the truth of that inflating his heart like a balloon until it pressed almost painfully against his lungs and shortened his breath. He longed to hold her in his arms as he remembered having once done, only this time he wanted to do more than just snuggle for warmth beneath blankets on the floor of some tent lost in the wilderness. Grecolus said what he wanted to do was a sin when it was done out of wedlock, but at that moment he didn’t care. If Grecolus wanted to condemn him for thinking of making love to Allison Stargazer while he waited in an animal’s cage for Ternosh the Grumak to decide his fate by some drug-induced vision of a strange race’s afterlife, Brisbane thought, then Grecolus could take his best shot. Brisbane believed dreams and thoughts of that sort may very well be the only things that kept him sane during this ordeal, and if he somehow survived to see Stargazer again, he vowed to do his very best to make these dreams come true.

He thought about Roundtower, another warrior like Shortwhiskers, but unlike Shortwhiskers in his manner and purpose. He was a teacher of sorts to Brisbane as well, and he was also something more. Brisbane had an amazing amount of respect for Ignatius Roundtower, even though he did not agree with his religious beliefs. They had fought battles together, too, but what was different about Roundtower was the reason why he was fighting the battles. He was following his dream to become a Knight of Farchrist, and Brisbane could respect him for that if for nothing else. The dream was no longer his own, but it had been his mother’s for him, and Brisbane knew it wasn’t necessarily the content of the dream that won his respect. It was the way Roundtower pursued it, never giving it up and moving towards it in everything he did. He had the faith of Grecolus and was not out adventuring to increase his wealth or fame, he was out to increase his skill with his sword so he could serve his lord better. When Brisbane had happened along, Angelika had left Roundtower free to pursue the next stage of his dream. There was no guarantee he would be accepted by some knight to become a squire, but Brisbane knew Roundtower would be there for as long as it took.

He thought about Dantrius, the illusionist Roystnof had restored to flesh in the basilisk’s garden and who had recognized Brisbane from a mental image of his grandfather. The man had been a pain in Brisbane’s side since that day and the small pleasure he took in knowing he was separated from Illzeezad Dantrius was tainted with the fearful knowledge that the mage was still among his friends. Brisbane knew too many things about Dantrius and he didn’t know which, if any, of them were true. Shortwhiskers said he had betrayed King Gregorovich II at the request of the dragon Dalanmire. Roystnof said he worshipped Damaleous and believed he got his power from the Evil One. Brisbane was only sure of the growing dislike he felt for the man, and had felt from him, since they had met. Brisbane hoped Dantrius would leave them all alone, but Roystnof didn’t seem to think he would without disturbing something. Brisbane realized that right now, Illzeezad Dantrius, and what he might do, were the least of his problems.

He thought about Smurch, the half-ork he had named Jack and who had been tossed in his cage the night before. The only person within miles Brisbane could tentatively call a friend, Brisbane was not sure what to make of this half-ork Jack Smurch. He obviously didn’t like his life of abuse from the pure-blooded members of the clan—who would, even if they hadn’t once been the son of a chief? Brisbane would have liked to think he could use this against his captors somehow, maybe get Smurch to do secret favors for him, but he didn’t know if he was ever going to see the half-ork again. He seemed to be the only member of the Clan of the Red Eye who hadn’t passed by to catch a glimpse of the freak Brisbane had become. Brisbane knew. He had kept his eyes peeled for the half-ork all day.

Lastly, he thought about Grumak Ternosh, the ork who had the power of magic at his disposal and the one who would decide Brisbane’s fate. The question of Ternosh’s power was still a puzzle to Brisbane. He had worked a cantrip in what the Grumak had declared as an anti-magic zone, and so Brisbane questioned just how powerful his magic could be. Even what had just happened in the Grumak’s chamber, which appeared to have been a powerful example of summoning and divining magic, might have been no more than a hallucination caused by the inhalation of the smoke from that strange red powder. It was obvious the incense had been some kind of drug and while he was under the influence, Brisbane could be sure of nothing he sensed. The entire episode with the Demosk, whatever that really was, had possessed a dream-like quality, and it could have been as unreal as Brisbane’s feeling of floating free from his chains.

These are the people who walked through Brisbane’s thoughts as he sat in his cage, trying to ignore the orks outside and waiting for the return of Ternosh the Grumak. He wondered if he shouldn’t try to formulate some sort of plan of escape but the idea seemed strangely ridiculous to him, knowing as little as he did about his surroundings and the potential events of the next few hours. Any plan he could devise was more than likely doomed to failure by any one of a thousand variables Brisbane had no control over. To play it by ear was as detailed a plan Brisbane felt he should make and he pessimistically realized this was pretty much the same plan he had followed for his entire life so far.

The waiting and the flood of orkish bodies past his cage finally ended that day when Ternosh emerged from the cave mouth in his red robes with Vrak right on his heels. The Grumak came out and stood before Brisbane, glaring angrily at him for several seconds before turning to address the crowd of orks in their native language.

It was a speech of sorts and Brisbane watched as the men, women, and children listened silently and wide-eyed to every word. The whole while Vrak stood behind Ternosh’s right shoulder and he would occasionally turn and burn Brisbane with a mixed look of fear and hatred. Brisbane wished time and again he could understand orkish so he would know what it was Ternosh was telling his people, but it was a wish that went ungranted. As he finished, Ternosh raised his hands to the massed populace and sent his voice up many decibels. He rang a final sentence out over their heads and the people reacted with cries of surprise and triumph. When Ternosh lowered his arms, the people quieted and began to slowly disperse back into the settlement.

Ternosh and Vrak turned back to Brisbane. He had come to the front of his cage and had his hands curled around the bars as he watched his audience stream away from him.

Ternosh waited until Brisbane took notice of his angry stare. “Well, Brisbane,” the Grumak said when he had the human’s attention. “It seems He-Who-Watches has revealed to me his purpose in granting the powers of my kind upon a human.”

Ternosh motioned to Vrak and the ork went over to the door of the circus wagon. Vrak worked at the lock with his key and opened the door. He did not enter the wagon. He did not have any other guards with him. Brisbane looked at him for a long moment and then turned back to Ternosh.

“We are all creatures of duty,” the Grumak said seriously. “Some of us are more powerful than others, but in the end, we are all creatures of duty. What I am about to do, I do because it is my duty to do so. Personally, I do not agree with this action, but it seems the path has already been made for me, and now I must walk down it.”

All the other orks were still leaving the scene. This discourse confused Brisbane profoundly. What was Ternosh talking about? What was he about to do?

“You can come out of your cage, Brisbane,” Ternosh said.

Brisbane did nothing.

The Grumak addressed Vrak in orkish. Reluctantly, Vrak backed away from the open cage door.

“Come on,” Ternosh said to Brisbane. “I have little time for your dalliance.”

Brisbane began to move slowly out of his cage. He arrived at the door and Vrak backed off another few paces. Brisbane stood half-in and half-out of the door and looked up at the darkening sky. Vrak had freed him of his bonds and his gag when the ork had returned him to the cage, and without them the outside air smelled a bit sweeter and the sky looked a bit wider. Brisbane started down the few wooden steps and stood upon the hard earth. Vrak grimaced at him as he made his way around the wagon to stand in front of Ternosh.

The Grumak put his hands on his hips and sized Brisbane up and down. “You are free, Brisbane. You may leave this camp.”

Brisbane did not move.

Ternosh spoke to Vrak in a commanding tone, then turned back to address Brisbane. “I have told Vrak not to molest you. If you wish it, Vrak will even escort you from the camp. I am serious. You are truly free to go.”

Brisbane looked the Grumak over very carefully. Something smelled extremely fishy here. Vrak and Ternosh were now the only two orks within a hundred yards and the others were getting farther away every second. Ternosh seemed sincere but there was an odd little twinkle in his remaining red eye that sent shivers up and down Brisbane’s spine.

On the surface of his consciousness, Brisbane was convinced this offer of freedom was some kind of trick, something Ternosh wanted Brisbane to jump up at so he could be knocked down even further. He simply could not accept the fact that the orks would just let him go after all they had done to keep him here. But subconsciously, deep down in the pool of Brisbane’s thoughts, so deep that the surface was undisturbed by it, a soft and seductive feminine voice begged Brisbane not to leave without her, reminding Brisbane vengeance would be theirs if he would only be patient and strong.

A full minute of silence went by as Brisbane stood there in indecision. The whole time Ternosh seemed to be studying Brisbane’s face, as if he planned to paint it later from memory. When the minute had passed, and neither Brisbane, Ternosh, nor Vrak had taken a single step in any direction, Ternosh threw his head back and began to laugh.

“So,” the Grumak said, composing himself with some difficulty. “It is true. You will not leave. I did not believe it even though I heard it from the mouth of my own Demosk. There is something holding you here and you will not leave until you have acquired it. Good. Very good.”

Brisbane lowered his head. He could feel the force holding him here and yet he did not fully understand it. How could Angelika exert such a power over him? He was free to go, Ternosh would not stop him, and still his feet did not move. Just how much did that sword come to mean to him, anyway?

“What are you going to do with me?” Brisbane asked.

Ternosh seemed surprised Brisbane had even spoken. “Why, you will go into training, of course. You have just become my apprentice, Brisbane. You will be instructed in the magic and worship of He-Who-Watches and, when the time comes, you might very well become the Grumak of the Clan of the Red Eye.”

Brisbane did not like the sound of that. He wasn’t about to become the Grumak of any clan, and he certainly wasn’t going to start worshipping Gruumsh One-Eye. But that did not really matter, for in Ternosh’s words, Brisbane did not hear the threats of a controlled existence under the repressive arm of yet another primitive religion. What he did hear was a promise to go on living. The orks were not going to kill him, they were going to give him some time and, in that time, Brisbane nurtured a glimmer of hope he would somehow be able to recover Angelika and extract their vengeance from the hides of the orks around him.

Ternosh asked Brisbane to follow him and the Grumak led him into the cave. Vrak predictably fell into step right behind them.

+ + +

This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Running With the Demon by Terry Brooks

2026-04-20T07:00:00.000-05:00

This, then, is the beginning of my plan to read all the Shannara books in chronological order. This is actually the start of Brooks’s three-volume The Word and the Void series -- and it begins in pretty much present-day America -- in a town called Hopewell, Illinois.

Here’s the summary from the back of my paperback copy:

Plagued by nightmares that tell him something evil will soon unleash an ancient horror upon the world, John Ross feels irrevocably drawn to the sleepy town of Hopewell, Illinois. In Hopewell, fourteen-year-old Nest Freemark also senses that something is terribly wrong, but she has not yet learned to wield the budding power that sets her apart from her friends. Now the future of humanity depends on a man haunted by his dreams and on a gifted young girl -- two souls who will discover what survives when hope and innocence are shattered forever.

What was most interesting to me was the way this is actually horror and not fantasy -- or at least a kind of merging of horror and fantasy. And that started me thinking about Stephen King’s similar genre-bending attempts with his Dark Tower series. And I was left wondering.

King is a better horror writer than Brooks, and Brooks is a better fantasy writer than King. But which one is better at the opposite craft? In other words, which is better? King’s fantasy or Brooks’s horror?

They are very similar stories, but based on this fresh read of Running With the Demon and my dim recollection of The Gunslinger, I’d have to give the nod to Brooks’s horror.

+ + +

This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Nostromo by Joseph Conrad

2026-04-13T07:00:00.000-05:00

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date.

+ + +

Took me a long time to read this one and as I did so I came to refer to it as “my stupid book.”

That’s probably too harsh. I found myself nodding off a lot, but probably largely because I read it at night before going to bed. On weekend afternoons, I found it a better read.

It seemed to take a long time for the actual story to begin, the first 200 pages seemingly devoted to exposition and character development. Characters, that is, except for Nostromo, who is kind of a ghostly figure until he makes a late appearance in part two and suddenly makes the story his own.

In retrospect, it may have been an effective structure because the characters in the story feel like they have unique histories behind them, but those first 200 pages were kind of tough to get through.

Everyone in the novel thinks Nostromo has unassailable integrity, but through a series of accidents and circumstances, he finds himself the only person who knows where a fortune in silver is buried. Rather than reveal his secret and return the silver to its owner, even after the danger that brought the accidents and circumstances has passed, he decides to keep it to himself and “slowly get rich” under the guise of a successful shipping business with his schooner. His penalty, in the strange morality of fiction, is death by accidental shooting by someone who thinks of him as a son.

That’s the story, but the book is much larger than that, encompassing a revolution in a fictional South American republic and the plunder of its natural resources by foreign commercial exploits at the expense of its own citizens. Although Nostromo’s story fills fewer pages, it seems more real and immediate than its overpowering and sometimes indistinct backstory. I doubt I’ll put any more Conrad on my reading list.

A quote worth noting:

Nostromo shook his head resolutely. He did not believe in priests in their sacerdotal character. A doctor was an efficacious person; but a priest, as priest, was nothing, incapable of doing either good or harm. Nostromo did not even dislike the sight of them as old Giorgio did. The utter uselessness of the errand was what struck him the most.

And:

In our activity alone do we find the sustaining illusion of an independent existence as against the whole scheme of things of which we form a helpless part.

+ + +

This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

2026-04-06T07:00:00.000-05:00

FARCHRIST TALES

BOOK THREE:

THE UNDERGOD

My mother realized the necessity of a father-figure in my life—a good, positive role model for her son to emulate and to learn from. Otis seemed to be the perfect choice. A man of Grecolus, he ran a good business and had enough education to impart to a young boy the moral, ethical, and religious training needed to rise above the rabble of the world. Amanda made her decision early in her pregnancy and did everything in her power to make herself available and attractive to Otis. She still loved my father, and would never stop loving him, but the responsibility of their son demanded such actions. Otis Parkinson was wise enough to see what she was doing, but took things slowly and bit by bit worked his unassuming way into my life and my mother’s heart. When I was three years old, the wedding was held in the local temple, and my mother took the name of a man more than ten years older than she.

+ + +

When morning came, Smurch was removed from the cage by a group of groggy orks and put immediately to work around the settlement. Brisbane would not see him again until that night, but his day was filled with enough activity to keep him from missing the half-ork.

After he had returned the night before, Brisbane had shaken off Smurch’s questions about the importance of one sword and concentrated instead on getting Smurch to promise not to tell his superiors about Brisbane’s magic and his little midnight trip. It wasn’t easy, but he eventually got his wish when he reminded the half-ork that Ternosh would supposedly discover his true power the next day anyway.

Before they had finally gone to sleep for the night, Smurch reconsidered his duty to report Brisbane’s power to the clan in the light that Brisbane was, in fact, a Grumak of considerable power. The half-ork decided he would do as Brisbane wished for that reason if for no other. As he had said before, Gruumsh One-Eye must have sent a human Grumak here for a reason, and Smurch decided it was wise to steer clear of whatever that reason might be. He was, after all, just half an ork, and he didn’t know if he even had a place in the eternal army of He-Who-Watches.

The sun had only been up for an hour or two when a determined group of orks, led by Vrak, made their way over to Brisbane’s cage. Vrak opened the door with his key and sent four very large orks into the wagon to tie and gag Brisbane. He did not put up a fight, letting the orks secure his hands behind his back and place another awful-tasting gag in his mouth. Soon he was ready for transport and the orks led him out of the wagon.

Vrak stood there at the exit and when Brisbane reached the ground he snapped a few hostile-sounding words to his prisoner in his harsh language.

Brisbane burned the ork with an angry stare. Your name may be Vrak, but your teeth are no less twisted, you ugly bastard. Did you know I can open that lock without your key? Did you, Vrak?

Vrak pushed Brisbane ahead and he took control of the bonds connecting his wrists. The ork quickly began walking Brisbane toward the entrance of the cave.

Vrak. How many syllables does your name have, Vrak? Can you count that high? You’re just a flunkie, aren’t you, Vrak? A whipping boy with someone to whip.

They entered the cave and Brisbane’s vision suddenly failed him. Vrak kept pushing him forward. It was noticeably colder inside the cave and Brisbane could feel his steps descending into the earth. As they went along, his eyes began to adjust to the darkness and Brisbane could begin to make out the walls and floor of a tunnel. There were many turns and side passages. Some of them he was pushed past, some of them he was pushed into. Even if he could see his surroundings perfectly well, the many twists and turns he had taken would have left him utterly lost in what had to be a confusing maze of corridors.

Eventually, Brisbane was forced through an open portal and into a chamber that would have been unusual in the dark tunnels for no other reason than it was lighted by bright torches. But there was plenty else about the room that made it unusual. It was circular, about thirty feet in diameter, with smoothly polished walls unlike the rough stone found in the tunnels. The torches hung in wall sconces around the chamber, lighting the unusual contents of the room. In the very center, painted on the floor, was a red circled pentagram about three feet in diameter. On one side of the pentagram was a large chair, ornately carved with thousands of tiny ork faces, mouths open in screams of pain or pleasure. Seated in this chair, dressed in the red robes he had worn the day before, was Ternosh the Grumak.

Ternosh said something to Vrak in orkish and the ork pushed Brisbane into the room and onto a small chair in front of the Grumak, on the opposite side of the pentagram. While Vrak fastened a chain to Brisbane’s wrists that would keep them connected to the floor behind him, Brisbane looked around at the rest of the room. A small shelf ran nearly all the way around the wall at about neck level. This shelf was stuffed with all kinds of books and papers and boxes bulging over with miscellaneous items. The cluttered paraphernalia reminded Brisbane of all the things he had carried into a house owned by a man named Roy Stonerow so many years ago. There was a workbench of sorts behind Brisbane, but he did not have much of a chance to see what was on it, apart from a vague impression of some glassware and some rubber tubing.

Ternosh said something else in orkish to Vrak and the ork grudgingly removed Brisbane’s gag and slowly left the chamber. When he was gone, Ternosh fixed his single red eye on Brisbane.

“Well now,” the Grumak said in the common speech of humans, roughly spoken but understandable. “The time has come for our little talk. Let’s start at the beginning. What were you doing in the mountains?”

Brisbane did not see any reason not to answer the Grumak’s questions. Smurch’s opinion had been that his only chance was to cooperate and prove himself to be a human Grumak. If Ternosh discovered him to be a fake, Brisbane was sure he would quickly be killed for the sacrilege of wearing what was, in effect, an orkish holy symbol.

But what was this question about his presence in the mountains? Brisbane thought he had been brought here so the Grumak could somehow test him for magical powers. Why the interrogation? Brisbane was not sure what he should do.

Ternosh rose to his feet. He brought out a slim glass rod that had been concealed in the folds of his red robes. It was about a foot long and had a round glass ball about the size of a tangerine on the end of it.

He held the rod up for Brisbane to see. “Do you know what this is? My people call it the drom-kesh. A loose translation into your tongue renders it ‘the wand of pain.’”

Brisbane still said nothing.

Ternosh went on. “With it, I can channel the power given to me by He-Who-Watches from my mind into your flesh. The raw power, unfocused and unshaped as it is, can then dance across your nerves in a way that I’ve heard can be most painful. If you don’t answer my questions, and answer them now, I will use the drom-kesh on you.”

Brisbane did not know if this was possible, but he didn’t want to test it. He really didn’t see any point in hiding things from the Grumak, anyway. Smurch seemed to believe Ternosh would discover everything in the end, with or without Brisbane’s compliance. If he answered, he was not sure what was going to happen to him. If he did not answer, evidently he was to be tortured.

“So,” Ternosh said. “I shall ask you one more time. What were you doing in the mountains?”

“I was traveling,” Brisbane said.

Ternosh sat back down. He placed the drom-kesh in his lap. “Very good. You were traveling. What was your destination?”

“I was searching for a temple rumored to exist at the source of the Mystic River.” Brisbane did not see any harm in this line of questioning. What would Ternosh care about his expedition?

Ternosh’s brow ridge went up. “A temple? Devoted to which god?”

“Grecolus.”

Ternosh nodded. “I know of this temple. It lies quite a bit farther up the Mystic than the place where you were found. Were you traveling alone?”

“No,” Brisbane said absent-mindedly. The orks knew about the lost temple? They lived in the hills and obviously patrolled the mountains. Brisbane supposed their knowledge of the temple was not that unusual. How long had the Clan of the Red Eye been here? Were they here when, say, the temple was a living part of the religious life of Grecolus? Perhaps they had attacked the temple and killed all the priests in their conquest of other races? It could explain a lot.

“Where are your companions?” Ternosh asked.

Now the questions were getting dangerous, Brisbane judged.

Ternosh held up the drom-kesh.

Brisbane told the ork how he had become separated from his friends. He did not say who his friends were or any of the events that had led up to his fall from the mountain top.

Ternosh stood up and began to pace in a slow, small circle around his carved chair. He tapped the drom-kesh against his chin with contemplative regularity.

“What is your name?” Ternosh asked.

Brisbane again so no reason to lie. “My name is Brisbane.” To most strangers he gave the name Parkinson. It usually avoided a lot of tiresome questions. With Ternosh, Brisbane did not think that would be necessary.

“You must forgive me, Brisbane,” the Grumak said. “I admit I have been delaying the inevitable. The scouting party that found you on the river bank also discovered the massacre of the kroganes in their lair. I believe your race calls them ettins.”

Brisbane said nothing.

“And just this morning,” the Grumak went on, “another party returned from the west with news of a slaughtered group of eight grugan. Orks, as you would call them, from this clan. I am very curious as to who could be responsible for all these deaths. Was it you? Your friends?”

Brisbane lowered his eyes and still said nothing. He fought uselessly against the chain that held him to the floor. They’re going to kill me, he thought. For killing their friends. Ettins and orks. They’re going to kill me.

Ternosh stopped pacing behind his chair. He waited until Brisbane stopped fighting the chain and looked back up at him.

“No matter, really,” the Grumak said. “You see, we grugan take a different look on combat than you humans do. It is a way of life to us and, when a man dies in combat, we believe it is just and that he deserved his death. In this way only the strongest survive.”

Brisbane still did not say anything.

“So,” Ternosh said. “You need have no concern for your own life because you may have killed some of our number. Even Kras, the man you strangled to death when you were taken captive, will not condemn you. If you are to be killed, I will do it, and it will be because you bear the symbol of that which you cannot be.”

With that, Ternosh went quickly over to the shelf that nearly circled the chamber, put the drom-kesh away and took down what appeared to be a large, golden incense burner. Ternosh brought it over and set it down in the middle of the pentagram at Brisbane’s feet. It had a five-pointed base, each point stretching out into one of the arms of the star. The bowl was about the size of a large cooking pot, and it too had five sides to it, set askew to the points of the base. The curving lid rested on a flat lip that ran all the way around the edge of the bowl and was pierced with five star-shaped holes to allow the incense smoke to escape.

Ternosh then went back to the shelf and took down a heavy, folded-up curtain, which he hung from some hooks above the open portal of the chamber. Lastly, from the shelf, he obtained a small golden bowl and a short silver knife. The Grumak returned to his carved chair.

“Now,” Ternosh said. “We shall hear the truth of the matter.” He took the lid off the golden vessel at their feet and Brisbane could see the bottom was filled with a fine red powder. Ternosh said an orkish word and a spark jumped off one of his fingers and fell into the powder. He replaced the lid as dark gray smoke began to trail out of the bowl, and then he stood up and went over to Brisbane.

“I will require some of your blood for the process,” the Grumak said as he brought the silver knife up and cut it into the side of Brisbane’s neck.

The pain was hot and immediate, but Brisbane did not flinch away as Ternosh held the small golden bowl up to catch some of the human’s blood. When he had collected enough for his purposes, the ork brought a sticky bandage out from one of the folds in his robe and pressed it against Brisbane’s wound. It held itself there and the Grumak said it would stop the bleeding.

Ternosh returned to his chair with the bowl of Brisbane’s blood. By now, smoke was pouring out of the vents in the golden burner. It had the smell of sharp oranges and was already beginning to make Brisbane’s eyes water. With the way the smoke was coming out of the vents and the curtain hung in the doorway, it would not be long before the room was thick with it.

“What are you doing?” Brisbane asked, his voice sounding far away from his ears.

“I am summoning my Demosk,” Ternosh said, his voice sounding more inside Brisbane’s head than outside. “He will sample your blood and tell me whether or not He-Who-Watches has infused it with power.”

With that, the Grumak began a low guttural chant in the tongue of magic Brisbane could almost understand. The orange-scented smoke was so thick now as to obscure Ternosh’s form across from Brisbane. He could only see glimpses of the red robes through the haze. His eyes were crying tears in reaction to the smoke, but it was not painful, and his head was swimming in a dizzy sea of pleasant feelings. Brisbane could no longer feel the chain that bound him or the chair he sat upon. He felt like he was floating free in the vapor, and he didn’t care where he might float to. Still, the Grumak’s chanting went on.

Brisbane’s rational mind, small and sheltered deep within his head, whispered that the incense was some kind of drug, and both he and Ternosh were flying on it. But Brisbane did not care about that, and did not care that his defenses were down and he was susceptible to suggestion and delusion. All he cared about was feeling good, and in a room full of this smoke, that was not much of a care at all.

As Ternosh continued to chant, an eerie light began to pour out of the incense burner, five tiny beams that widened and focused together at a spot in the smoky air about five feet

—or was it five miles?—

off the floor. Smoke poured through this light, making it appear as if it moved along without changing position.

Suddenly, Ternosh’s chanting shifted its timbre and the spot of ghostly white began to take shape. Its sphere elongated into the small head and torso of a humanoid figure. Slender arms broke away from the body and darker features began to deepen into it. The figure developed the pig-ears and snout of an ork, but under the heavy brow ridge, there was no trace of any eyes whatsoever. The figure floated in the air before Brisbane, but it only seemed to exist where the smoke was. As the vapor moved across it, where it was thinner, the figure was dimmer, and where it was absent, the figure was transparent.

Ternosh stopped chanting and stood up.

The floating figure opened its mouth and spoke. Brisbane heard it as the common tongue, but if he had had Ternosh’s ears, he would have heard orkish. “Why have you summoned me from the battlefield, Grumak Ternosh?”

Ternosh spoke to his Demosk in the native tongue of the grugan. Brisbane could not understand these words but, again, they seemed to sound more in his head than in his ears.

“I see,” The Demosk said. “The test is a simple one. Give me the bowl.”

Ternosh handed the small bowl with Brisbane’s blood in it to the Demosk. Brisbane’s rational mind might have asked how a creature made of light and smoke could hold and support a golden bowl, but that part of his mind was growing smaller with every inhalation. The Demosk held the bowl in its small hands, raised it to its smoky lips, and drank down its contents.

When finished, the Demosk tossed the bowl back to Ternosh. There was no sign of Brisbane’s blood anywhere. It was indeed as if the apparition had imbibed it.

Ternosh spoke again to the figure in orkish.

“Grumak Ternosh, the taste is unmistakable. The blood does contain the bane of Gruumsh One-Eye.”

The bane of Gruumsh One-Eye? What does that mean? The smoke was beginning to make Brisbane sick to his stomach.

Ternosh stiffened and launched into an explosive tirade against the shimmering Demosk. The figure floated patiently before the Grumak, waiting blindly for the ork to run out of breath.

“The blood contains the bane of Gruumsh One-Eye,” the Demosk said when Ternosh had finished. “I was summoned and I have performed as demanded. Grumak Ternosh, do you require anything else?”

Ternosh waved his hand angrily at the Demosk and the figure vanished in the blink of an eye. Instantly, smoke stopped coming out of the incense burner and the smoke already present in the room quickly began to dissipate. Brisbane’s rationality began a long swim back up to the surface and he began to again sense his surroundings. The effect of the drug had left him with an upset stomach and a headache. He began to wonder just what it had been in that smoke that had made him feel so light-headed. He began to wonder what kind of spell Ternosh had used to summon up his Demosk. He began to wonder just where the Demosk had been summoned from. He began to wonder where his blood that had been in the bowl had really gone. And beneath all these wonders, Brisbane still was bothered by what the Demosk could have possibly meant by the bane of Gruumsh One-Eye.

Before long, all the smoke had disappeared from the chamber and Ternosh was returning his items to the shelf that ran around the room. Brisbane’s head was clear but he felt a little tired and his pain and hunger had returned to him in force, seemingly worse after his short reprieve from them.

Ternosh called out for Vrak and moments later the ork burst into the chamber. His eyes scanned the room, his sword in hand, indicating he had expected some kind of trouble, but he saw everything as he had left it.

Ternosh turned to Brisbane. “Well,” he said. “It seems your power has been verified. Personally, I cannot fathom why He-Who-Watches would grant the power on a member of such an inferior race, but evidently he has. I will need time to decide just what his purpose may be in this matter. Vrak will return you to your cage until I have need of you again.”

The Grumak turned to Vrak and repeated his order to him in orkish. Vrak came over to Brisbane, reaffixed the foul gag, and released him from the chain that had kept Brisbane connected to the floor. Roughly, the ork jerked Brisbane to his feet and moved him towards the chamber’s exit.

“Remember,” Ternosh said before Brisbane left, “my spell of anti-magic still protects the circus wagon. Within it, you cannot use any of the spells you might have learned.”

That’s what you think, Brisbane thought. My cantrip worked and it will be interesting to see what else will work. Your anti-magic spell is a joke, Ternosh. It’s a sham, and I think you know it. But I wonder if you know I know it?

Vrak pushed him roughly from the chamber.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Satanstoe by James Fenimore Cooper

2026-03-30T07:00:00.000-05:00

I guess there’s a strange story behind this one.

As I’ve written elsewhere -- anyone who is familiar with Cooper is familiar with The Last of the Mohicans. Some smaller portion of those people are familiar with the larger Leatherstocking Tales, a series of five novels among which The Last of the Mohicans is the second, chronologically. Some smaller portion of those people are familiar with other series that Cooper wrote, especially one called The Littlepage Manuscripts, of which Satanstoe is the first chronological volume.

I first read Satanstoe in my dimly-remembered past -- 1992ish, based on my log of read books. I didn’t remember much about it, other than it set me on my quest to acquire the other two volumes in the series -- The Chainbearer (which I eventually found in a used bookstore somewhere) and The Redskins (which I broke down and purchased as a ‘print and ship’ option off the Internet).

And now, I’ve recently re-read Satanstoe and it, sadly, left even less of an impression on me this time. The entire series of Littlepage Manuscripts is loosely about the issues behind the American Anti-Rent War of the early 1840s (when the novels were written), in which several “Anti-Renters” declared their independence from the manor system run by their patroons, resisting tax collectors and successfully demanding land reform. To Cooper, these Anti-Renters were a mob, dangerously taking the principles of democracy too far, and stripping inalienable property rights from their betters.

The trilogy is the story of several generations of Littlepages, who own vast tracts of undeveloped land in upstate New York, and who battle against their upstart renters and other indigenous and foreign adversaries. In Satanstoe, the name of their ancestral estate on Long Island, the protagonist is a young Cornelius Littlepage, with the events taking place in the 1750s. As a result, almost none of the anti-rent issues are really explored in the plot. Instead, it is much more of a romance, as young ‘Corny’ pursues and eventually marries an equally young Anneke Mordaunt, thereby becoming the patriarch and matriarch of the Littlepages in the following novels.

It is very much a tale reminiscent of The Last of the Mohicans, with young women in danger in the wilderness, who must be protected by the young white men and their Indian guides. And for me, it is one of these Indian guides, known, as usual, by various names, that proves to be the most interesting.

This Indian was about six-and-twenty years of age; and was called a Mohawk, living with the people of that tribe; though I subsequently ascertained that he was in fact an Onondago by birth. His true name was Susquesus or Crooked Turns; an appellation that might or might not speak well of his character, as the “turns” were regarding in a moral or in a physical sense.

“Take that man. Mr. Littlepage, by all means,” said Herman Mordaunt’s agent, when the matter was under discussion. You will find him as useful in the woods as your pocket-compass, besides being a reasonably good hunter. He left here as a runner during the heaviest of the snows last winter, and a trial was made to find his trail within half an hour after he had quitted the clearing, but without success. He had not gone a mile in the woods before all traces of him were lost, as completely as if he had made the journey in the air.”

It is this ability to move without leaving a trace through the forest that gives Susquesus his most oft-repeated sobriquet, that of Trackless -- but in many ways Trackless is the very Pathfinder that will come out so strongly in Cooper’s more famous novels.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

2026-03-23T07:00:00.000-05:00

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date.

+ + +

I really enjoyed this book. I didn’t think I would after the first 50 pages, but it just goes to show you that you can’t judge a 945-page book by its first 50 pages. In the first 50 pages the characters seemed flat and hollow, caricatures of archetypal characters used in a hundred other stories. Most of all, Lorena, the whore with a heart of gold. But McMurtry throws these characters into real tough situations, doesn’t pull any punches, and they grow and mature and you begin to care about them like people. It was amazing. Some excerpts:

Deets liked his work, liked being part of the outfit and having his name on the sign; yet he often felt sad. His main happiness consisted of sitting with his back against the water tank at night, watching the sky and the changing moon.

He had known several men who blew their heads off, and he had pondered it much. It seemed to him it was probably because they could not take enough happiness just from the sky and the moon to carry them over the low feelings that came to all men.

Deets is an interesting character, a black man who is treated as nearly an equal by the cowboys in the Hat Creek Outfit, and respected for his capabilities and dependability by Call and McCrae. His death affects the men severely and, for Newt, it’s practically the last straw.

+ + +

When they left, he went off dutifully to make his rounds. Augustus hitched the new mules to the new wagon. The streets of San Antonio were silent and empty as they left. The moon was high and a couple of stray goats nosed around the walls of the old Alamo, hoping to find a blade of grass. When they had first come to Texas in the Forties people had talked of nothing but Travis and his gallant losing battle, but the battle had mostly been forgotten and the building neglected.

“Well, Call, I guess they forgot us, like they forgot the Alamo,” Augustus said.

“Why wouldn’t they?” Call asked. “We ain’t been around.”

“That ain’t the reason—the reason is we didn’t die,” Augustus said. “Now Travis lost his fight, and he’ll get in the history books when someone writes up this place. If a thousand Comanches had cornered us in some gully and wiped us out, like the Sioux just done to Custer, they’d write songs about us for a hundred years.”

It struck Call as a foolish remark. “I doubt there was ever a thousand Comanches in one bunch,” he said. “If there had been they would have taken Washington, D.C.”

But the more Augustus thought about the insults they had been offered in the bar—a bar where once they had been hailed as heroes—the more it bothered him.

“I ought to have given that young pup from Mobile a rap or two,” he said.

“He was just scared,” Call said. “I’m sure Tobe will lecture him next time he sees him.”

“It ain’t the pint, Woodrow,” Augustus said. “You never do get the pint.”

“Well, what is it, dern it?” Call asked.

“We’ll be the Indians, if we last another twenty years,” Augustus said. “The way this place is settling up it’ll be nothing but churches and dry-goods stores before you know it. Next thing you know they’ll have to round up us old rowdies and stick us on a reservation to keep us from scaring the ladies.”

“I’d say that’s unlikely,” Call said.

“It’s dern likely,” Augustus said. “If I can find a squaw I like, I’m apt to marry her. The thing is, if I’m going to be treated like an Indian, I might as well act like one. I think we spent out best years fighting on the wrong side.”

This is a nice summation of the relationship between Call and McCrae, their opposing philosophies, and a poignant commentary on what happens to the pioneers after civilization doesn’t need them any more. A lot of Lonesome Dove feels like this passage, especially the section at the end when Call is taking McCrae’s body back to Texas to be buried in accordance with McCrae’s wishes. No one understands why Call is doing it. The Hat Creek boys think he’s doing it as an excuse to abandon them, Clara thinks it’s to avoid revealing to Newt that Call is really his father, and the Indians he meets along the way think it must be because McCrae was some kind of holy man and that his remains have magical powers. But the right answer is that Call is doing it because he gave his word that he would, and Call is a man to keep his word, especially when it is given to a man like McCrae.

+ + +

Blue Duck hobbled the horses, then came and looked down at her. “I got a treatment for women that try to run away,” he said casually. “I cut a little hole in their stomachs and pull out a gut and wrap it around a limb. Then I drag them thirty or forty feet and tie them down. That way they can watch the coyotes come and eat their guts.”

He went back and lay down under a tree, adjusted his saddlebags for a pillow, and was soon asleep.

Blue Duck is another interesting character. Admittedly, he’s a villain in the shallow kind of way of most fictional villains. We never get to know why Blue Duck is evil. He just is, and he is to such a degree that people fear him even after he is dead and refuse to move his body from the stone street where he flung himself to his death rather than be hung. But having said that, Blue Duck also very well represents the divide between the Indian and White cultures, and is a testament to the view that they can never be reconciled, will always be at odds with one another. This passage struck me because of how vivid it is, but also how diabolical. Torturing people in this way, this unimaginable way to a White culture, shocks us, but also gives Blue Duck a ring of authenticity most fictional Indians don’t have. In that way, he is like the Indians in the Leatherstocking Tales, or the Africans in Henderson the Rain King.

+ + +

While he was thinking about it he nodded for a few minutes—it seemed like a few minutes—asleep with his gun cocked. He had a little dream about the wild pigs, not too frightening. The pigs were not as wild as they had been in real life. They were just rooting around a cabin and not trying to harm him, yet he woke in a terrible fright and saw something incomprehensible. Janey was standing a few feet in front of him, with a big rock raised over her head. She was holding it with both hands—why would she do such a thing at that time of night? She wasn’t making a sound; she just stood in front of him holding the rock. It was not until she flung it that he realized someone else was there. But someone was: someone big. In his surprise, Roscoe forgot he had a pistol. He quickly stood up. He didn’t see where the rock went, but Janey suddenly dropped to her knees. She looked around at him. “Shoot at him,” she said. Roscoe remembered the pistol, which was cocked, but before he could raise it, the big shadow that Janey had thrown the rock at slid close to him and shoved him—not a hard shove, but it made him drop the pistol. He knew he was awake and not dreaming, but he didn’t have any more strength than he would have had in a dream in terms of moving quick. He saw the big shadow standing by him but he had felt no fear, and the shadow didn’t shove him again. Roscoe felt warm and sleepy and sat back down. It was like he was in a warm bath. He hadn’t had too many warm baths in his life, but he felt like he was in one and was ready for a long snooze. Janey was crawling, though—crawling right over his legs. “Now what are you doing?” he said, before he saw that her eyes were fixed on the pistol he had dropped. She wanted to pistol, and for some reason crawled right over his legs to get to it. But before she got to it the shadow came back. “Why, you’re a fighter, ain’t you?” the shadow man said. “If I wasn’t in such a hurry I’d show you a trick or two.” Then he raised his arms and struck down at her; Roscoe couldn’t see if it was with an ax or what, but the sound was like an ax striking wood, and Janey stopped moving and lay across his legs. “Joe?” Roscoe said; he had just remembered that he had made Joe stop cocking and uncocking his rifle so he could get to sleep.

“Was that his name?” the shadow man said. Roscoe knew it must be a man, for he had a heavy voice. But he couldn’t see the man’s face. He just seemed to be a big shadow, and anyway Roscoe couldn’t get his mind fixed on it, or on where Joe was or when July would be back, or on anything much, he felt so warm and tired. The big shadow stood astraddle of him and reached down for his belt but Roscoe had let go all concern, he felt so tired. He felt everything would have to stop for a while; it was as if the darkness itself was pushing his eyelids down. Then the warm sleep took him.

This is the scene where Blue Duck kills Roscoe and Joe and Janey, and leaves their bodies for July and Gus to find. I like the way it’s told, not just because the point of view dies in the middle of it and we see the event through his dying eyes, but because it’s a nice way of showing how ill-suited Roscoe was for the challenges that confronted him on his trip, the trip to find July, the trip forced on him by others. Roscoe was only ever happy when he was sitting inside the warm jail in Arkansas, and he was clearly no match for someone the likes of Blue Duck. In a way it’s nice to see that Roscoe doesn’t even know he’s dying, that he goes to his death not understanding what’s happening around him and thinking that he is simply drifting off to sleep.

+ + +

Chapter 75

I’m not going to type the whole chapter. That would take too long. But if you ever get around to reading this, do yourself a favor and go read Chapter 75 of Lonesome Dove. That’s the kind of fiction I want to write. Stark, real, and teetering on the edge of unfathomable sadness. Have I ever succeeded?

+ + +

“Did you catch the horsethieves?” he asked.

“We did, but not before they murdered Wilbarger and four other people,” Augustus said.

“Hang ‘em?”

“Yes, hung them all, including Jake Spoon.”

“Well, I’ll swear,” Dish said, shocked. “I didn’t like the man but I never figured him for a killer.”

“He wasn’t a killer,” Augustus said. “Jake liked a joke and didn’t like to work. I’ve got exactly the same failings. It’s lucky I ain’t been hung.”

The hanging of Jake Spoon is perhaps the oddest episode in the book. I’m still not sure if McMurtry pulled it off. If my Dad hadn’t spilled the beans on me, I think I might have believed up to very end that Call and McCrae were not going to go through with it, that they were going to string him up with all the others, but dispatch them first and then let Jake go when there was no one left but the old gang. But they did it. They hung him. I guess because they couldn’t take them all into the authorities and their code of justice said either hang them all or let them all go. Of course, in the end it was Jake who hung himself, spurring the horse before the others could break out the whip. But it was Call and McCrae and the others who strung him up with every intent to do it. I guess this is the one piece that doesn’t feel real to me. I don’t think they would have hung him. The men that McMurty’s characters were, I don’t think they would have hung him. If they had been actors reading a script, they would have said, hey, wait a minute, I don’t think my character would do this. It doesn’t ring true. But if they are going to hang Jake Spoon, then spend more time feeling guilty about it afterwards. They hung Jake with no more emotion than they would have shown shooting a prize horse that had gone lame. Less, in fact.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

2026-03-16T07:00:00.000-05:00

FARCHRIST TALES

BOOK THREE:

THE UNDERGOD

Near the end of Farchrist Year Eighty-Six, my mother gave birth to me in the small room where she slept in the back of The Quarter Pony. She had been working there for nearly eight months, saving her earnings so she would have enough money to care for her newborn son. When the fact of her pregnancy became apparent, some rumors circulated around town about Otis being the father. He denied these accusations out of hand, but in all other ways, he treated the expectant Amanda as if she was his responsibility. He cared for her, watched over what and how much she ate, and when the time for delivery was near, he hired a part-time replacement waitress while still continuing to pay Amanda her salary. Indeed, when the labor pains struck, it was Otis who ran to fetch the midwife. Two minutes after I was born, I was placed in the arms of my loving mother. Two minutes after that, Amanda allowed Otis to hold me.

+ + +

Smurch and Brisbane talked long into the night, long after the last of the orks had fallen asleep around the campfire outside the circus wagon. As they talked, they began to fashion the semblance of a friendship between them, each finding likable traits present in the other.

Smurch told Brisbane many things about the orkish clan he had found himself in the middle of, and Brisbane told Smurch much about himself and many of the rumors he had heard growing up about orks. When Smurch heard these rumors, he sometimes had to clamp both hands over his large mouth to stifle the laughs that erupted.

Smurch said this clan called themselves the Clan of the Red Eye, as could be seen by the decoration on their shields, after the reputed color of Gruumsh’s one eye. The structure of the clan’s society was very rigid, with clearly defined upper and lower classes. The lower class were those who lived on the surface, outside the cave, and it included all the women and children and most of the men. The upper class lived in the cave that bored into one of the Windcrest Hills. It included the Sumak, the Grumak, and their bodyguards and henchmen. The easiest way to tell a lower class ork from an upper class one was to listen to his name. The lower class all had one-syllable names, except for the women who had no names at all, and the upper class all had two-syllable names. The Sumak had a three-syllable name. Therefore, Vrak and Plog, which Smurch said was Floppy’s real name, were members of the lower class and Ternosh was a member of the upper. The Sumak at this time was an ork named Tornestor, who happened to be Ternosh’s brother.

Brisbane found it very unusual that the female orks had no names. He questioned Smurch about it, and the half-ork revealed that, to the grugan, a name was tied to one’s skill in combat. The orkish women were not warriors, so they deserved no names. The way it worked was that upon the age of maturity, sixteen, a young male could choose a one-syllable name for himself, usually starting it with the same letter of his father’s name, out of respect. If his skill in armed combat increased enough in the coming years, the Sumak could choose him to join his personal guard, or the upper class. The ork would then be allowed to choose a second syllable for his name. There were constant challenges of combat amongst members of the upper class and, through such a process, the ork could theoretically rise to the position of Sumak itself. The third syllable was then added and he reigned until he was struck down from below.

It was a very efficient system for keeping the best warriors in the ruling class and it had been done that way for centuries. As far as Smurch knew, there had never been a woman who had taken a name and tried to compete in the tests of combat, but there wasn’t any law he knew of that said one couldn’t. It just had never been done before.

The position of Grumak was handled a bit differently than the chain of command that led up to the clan chief. Smurch did not know as much about it, but about once in every generation, an ork would be born with the mark of Gruumsh One-Eye—red eyes. These orks were immediately taken in by the existing Grumak, to be trained in his ways, and were given two-syllable names. Smurch did not know how the Grumak’s powers worked, but he did know that when an elder Grumak died, and one of his apprentices had to take his place, the apprentice had to pluck out his own left eye to emulate the appearance of their orkish god. To his knowledge, no female ork had ever been born with red eyes.

Smurch affirmed for Brisbane that the powers of a Grumak were very real, and that if Ternosh had said he had cast an anti-magic spell on the circus wagon, Brisbane could just bet that was what had been done.

Brisbane reflected on all he had been told about orkish—or grugan, as Smurch had said—society. He could see some parallels in it with human society, especially in the class system, but it seemed brutal in the extreme. When the measure of a man was his skill in mortal combat, death had to be as commonplace as arguments. The self-mutilation of their religious leaders shocked Brisbane and he wondered what kind of god would demand such a sacrifice on behalf of himself. Although he had yet to see how the males treated their females, the fact that the women hadn’t even the right to a name did quite a bit to illustrate the conditions. And he had first-hand experience as to how the orks treated their prisoners and those, like Smurch, who were in the least bit different.

Smurch told him something else that night about orkish society and life in the Clan of the Red Eye, and perhaps this told Brisbane more about what he had gotten himself into than anything Smurch has said so far. At Brisbane’s urging, Smurch told him the orkish story of creation.

In the beginning, when the gods came to the earth to populate it with races of their creation, there were six of them. Grecolus was the god of the humans, Corellon Larethian the god of the elves, Moradin the god of the dwarves, Garl Glittergold the god of the gnomes, Yondalla the god of the halflings, and Gruumsh One-Eye the god of the grugan.

Brisbane had heard mention of all these races, but had almost no exposure to most of them. He had lived among humans all his life. Stargazer had elven blood in her veins, but he did not know if and where any full-blooded elves still lived. Shortwhiskers was the only dwarf he had ever gotten to know, although he had seen a few of them in his life, and there was a sizable dwarven nation living north of Farchrist Castle in the Crimson Mountains. Brisbane had never seen either a gnome or a halfling, but it was said they flourished in other parts of the world, and he was now being held captive by a clan of orks. Again, his teachings had taught him Grecolus had created all of these races along with the world, but apparently the other races disagreed with this belief.

These six gods gathered together and drew lots to see in which parts of the world their respective races would dwell. Grecolus drew the lot which allowed humans to dwell wherever they pleased, in any environment. Corellon Larethian drew the lot of green forests. Moradin drew the one for the high mountains, Garl Glittergold picked the lot for the rocky, sunlit hills, and Yondalla was left with the fields and meadows. Then the assembled gods turned to Gruumsh and they laughed, mocking him.

“All the lots are taken,” they taunted. “Where will your people dwell, One-Eye? There is no place left!”

There was silence upon the world then as Gruumsh One-Eye lifted his great iron spear and stretched it over the world. The shaft blotted out of the sun over a great part of the lands as he spoke, “No! You lie! You have rigged the drawing of the lots, hoping to cheat me and my followers. But One-Eye never sleeps. One-Eye sees all. There is a place for the grugan to dwell…here!” he bellowed, and his spear pierced the mountains, opening mighty rifts and chasms. “And here!” and the spearhead split the hills and made them shake and covered them in dust. “And here!” and the black spear gouged the meadows and made them bare.

“There!” roared He-Who-Watches triumphantly, and his voice carried to the ends of the world. “There is where the grugan shall dwell! There they will survive, and multiply, and grow stronger, and a day will come when they will cover the world, and they shall slay all of your collected peoples. The grugan shall inherit the world you sought to cheat me of!”

Brisbane listened carefully to the entire story and then repeated it to Smurch to make sure he had it right. Brisbane was privately shocked by the tale. Here was a mythology, an entire culture, based on vengeance and the promise of victory over life-long enemies. Brisbane had felt the current leaders of Grecolus’ religion had twisted it into something similar—the promise of victory over the enemies of your beliefs in the afterlife and the vindication that comes with knowing that although you suffered, you were right all along—but at least that sentiment was a human corruption and not the law set down by a god. It appeared, however, that orks had that law, set down by Gruumsh One-Eye himself at the beginning of time when he lost in the fixed game of the other deities, a law to wage unending war against those who wronged them in the name of their rightful place in society and in the name of their god.

Hate, murder, and revenge were the cardinal virtues of the orks and Brisbane realized he would have to somehow adapt to them or he was going to have a very short future indeed. He asked Smurch exactly what was going to happen to him tomorrow, just how Ternosh was going to test his magic powers, but Smurch could tell him nothing, being wholly unfamiliar with the ways of the Grumak. Brisbane did not like it, but it appeared he would have to wait and see.

When Smurch had talked himself out, Brisbane returned the favor and told the half-ork a little about himself, where he was from, and how he had gotten there. He told him about the friends he had been separated from and about the journey they had made into the Crimson Mountains. He told him about the temple they had found at the source of the Mystic and about the shrine located farther down the river. He told him about the mission to rescue Roundtower and the decision to do the same for Dantrius. He told him about Stargazer’s powers and the meeting of Ellahannah deep in the Shadowhorn. He told him about his life in Scalt and being raised by his mother and Otis.

There was a lot to tell, more than Brisbane had thought there would be. Smurch listened patiently to him as Brisbane had to the half-ork and, at times, even seemed engrossed. Brisbane tried to tell Smurch some of the ways in which the religion of Grecolus differed from that of Gruumsh One-Eye, but the half-ork did not seem interested in this information. What Smurch seemed really interested in was the experiences Brisbane had with magic.

Smurch’s experience and teaching both agreed that only the Grumak of a clan could have the gift of He-Who-Watches, the ability to work magic. Brisbane told him of another world entirely, a world in which anyone could have this gift, for in that world, it was not a gift at all. It was a talent everyone had, in varying degrees, that could be nurtured and tended until it bloomed into proliferation. Smurch said he found this hard to believe, but in all honesty, he could tell Brisbane thought it was true.

Brisbane was frankly amazed at how easily Smurch listened to his claims that differed so drastically from what the half-ork had been taught and believed. Brisbane was used to dealing with people who were bound to shout out blasphemy at the drop of a hat and run screaming away from alternative ideas. Brisbane supposed it was because of the multi-theistic universe that seemed to exist for all the other races except humans. To humans, there was only one true god, and belief, worship, and discussion of other gods was forbidden. To the orks, their god was only one of many, a number of an elite group that reigned in dominion over the world. There were other gods, and therefore other religions, and therefore other beliefs. Brisbane had noticed each race thought their god was the strongest of the group—just look at the humans, who made their god so powerful, no other deities could even share the universe with him. This loyalty was understandable to Brisbane, but he wondered where it would fall in the case of half-breeds. Stargazer was a half-elf and she worshipped the human god Grecolus. Smurch was a half-ork and he worshipped the orkish god Gruumsh One-Eye. But how did each of them make their decision? Being of two races, did they not have two gods?

Just who were these gods in which thousands put so much faith? Were they real beings, different from Brisbane and all powerful? Were they just ideals? Were they separate or were they all the same with different names?

Eventually, Brisbane and Smurch bedded down for the night amidst the dirty straw of the cage and the loud snores of the orks around the dying campfire. Before falling asleep, Brisbane felt the need to relieve his bladder, for the first time since he had been taken captive by the orks. He winced when he realized just how little liquid was passing through his system. He went over to the bars facing away from the sleeping orks, dropped his pants and pointed his spray out through the bars. The process hurt a little and that bothered him. It could mean all the abuse he had taken had not just been external. Something inside of him could be seriously damaged after the treatment Vrak had given his gut with his fist. Luckily, his urine was clear and free of blood, otherwise Brisbane might have sat up all night worrying, quaking at every tremor of discomfort he felt in his midsection. What he wouldn’t give to have Stargazer here to ply her craft on his injuries.

Brisbane shook his head.

As long as he was wishing, what he wouldn’t give to be where Stargazer was so she could ply her craft on his injuries.

Brisbane finished his job and pulled up his trousers. He turned around and saw Smurch laying quietly in the straw at his feet. He looked up and saw the sleeping forms of the orks around the remains of the campfire. Besides their snores, there was not a sound to be heard in the settlement. The cave mouth yawned blackly in the darkness and no one had come out of it since the sun had gone down.

Brisbane crept over to the door of his cage. The time had come. He was going to see just how much power this Ternosh had and how far he could run before his disappearance could be discovered. He reached the door and snaked one of his arms through the bars, reaching down in an attempt to grasp the padlock that secured the door. He found he could do it. He could hold the lock in his hand. If his magic opened it, he could reach down and take it off the door latch. He could get free.

But what of Ternosh’s anti-magic spell? The Grumak had said no magic would work in his cage, but how could that be? How could you prevent another person’s magic from working? In all he had learned from Roystnof, Brisbane could not recall any spell, power, or process that would make this possible. Of course, Roystnof’s magic was not all the magic there was, as Dantrius had illustrated. Ternosh could have this power even if Roystnof did not.

The only thing to do was to try it and if it worked, it worked, and if it didn’t, it didn’t. Brisbane’s mind did offer him one glimmer of hope on the subject. The lock was outside his cage, and maybe it would not be affected by the anti-magic. It was a slim hope to have, but perhaps it would be enough. Brisbane held his hand outside the wagon, twisted his fingers into the proper position, and began to concentrate on turning the tumblers in the lock.

“What are you doing?”

Brisbane’s concentration broke. He pulled his hand back inside the wagon and turned around to face Smurch. The half-ork was standing there in the darkness, his hands on his hips and his feet placed shoulder-width apart.

Brisbane was not sure what he should say. “Nothing,” he eventually decided on.

“What do you mean, nothing? You were doing something.”

Brisbane decided, that in their short time together, he had fashioned enough of a friendship with Smurch to be honest with him now. Besides, he couldn’t very well carry through with his plan now without Smurch figuring it out.

“I was trying to open the lock,” Brisbane said. “I’m getting out of here if I can.”

“Without the key?” Smurch said. “You’re not strong enough to break that lock with your bare hands. I doubt if anyone is.”

“I wasn’t going to break it open, Jack.”

“Well, then, what were you doing?”

“I was trying to spell it open,” Brisbane said. “I know a spell that will open it if Ternosh’s magic will allow it.” Brisbane was not sure how Smurch was going to react.

“It won’t,” Smurch said. “The Grumak has the power to do what he says. But please, don’t let that stop you. Go right ahead.”

Brisbane’s brow wrinkled. “What?”

“Go ahead,” Smurch said. “I’m not going to stop you. I must admit, part of me wants to see you do it. A human Grumak is something unheard of, and if you are genuine, you’re going to set the grugan world on its ear.”

“What if I open it, Jack?” Brisbane asked suddenly. “What if I do have some magic powers? What if I am a human Grumak and I do open this door?”

Smurch looked dumbly at Brisbane. “What if you do, Gil?”

“Will you raise some sort of alarm? Wake those orks up?”

Smurch smiled. “How could I do that if I’m sleeping?”

Brisbane smiled back. He turned again to the door, stretched his arm out the barred window, and began the simple little spell that would open the padlock.

Tumble, his mind commanded the tumblers and, helplessly, they did as they were told. Brisbane heard them click into place and the lock fell open. He picked it off the door and brought it inside with his arm. He turned around and held it up in front of Smurch.

“I did it,” Brisbane said, remembering to keep his voice low. “It worked, Jack.”

Smurch took the lock from Brisbane’s hand and examined it. “So it has, Gil. I can’t believe it even with the proof in my hands. You are a Grumak.”

“It was a simple spell, Jack. Roystnof, my friend and teacher, calls it a cantrip. My power is not that great.”

“Your power is very great indeed if it can overcome Ternosh’s magic,” Smurch said almost reverently. “The spell may have been minor, but your power cannot be.”

Brisbane did not want to argue the point. He wanted to get out of there. He extended a hand to Smurch and the half-ork numbly shook it.

“Glad we met, Jack, but I hope you understand when I say I never want to meet you again. At least not under these circumstances.”

Smurch looked at him oddly. “You’re going? You’re really a Grumak. You can’t leave. He-Who-Watches must have sent you here for a reason.”

Brisbane shook his head. “My power does not come from your god, Jack. I may be a sorcerer of sorts, but I am not a Grumak. I do not worship Gruumsh One-Eye.”

“But your power is real…” Smurch said, trailing off, obviously having trouble with the contradiction.

Brisbane cut to the heart of the matter. “Jack, I now have no time for this. Grumak or not, you promised not to raise a fuss if I escaped. Are you going to be true to your word?”

Smurch straightened up. “Grugan are men of their words, Gil. I now regret making the promise, but I will not break it.” He handed the lock back to Brisbane. “Here. Lock me in when you leave. It will add to the mystery.”

Brisbane took the lock. “Goodbye, Jack.”

“Farewell, Gil.”

Brisbane then went to the door and quietly pushed it open. He stepped out into the night, shut and relocked the door behind him, and began to creep away from the prison that had once held him. Brisbane knew he was far from free. He had the entire ork settlement to steal through unnoticed and, although it was a dark night, it would be foolish to think everyone was asleep and dreaming of vengeance against other races. He trotted along, low to the ground, and tried not to make any noise.

Soon he was entirely away from the circus wagons and the cluster of orks sleeping by the cave mouth, and into the body of the settlement itself. The open ground seemed deserted and Brisbane hoped all the nameless ork women had all their noisy children inside the tents or the ramshackle buildings, sleeping quietly and nestled against their big breasts. One tiny insomniac or one questing for a drink of midnight water could spell death for him.

Things went well as he bounded as quickly as he dared across the scrubland. Brisbane began to believe he might be able to make it out when he remembered the Dogmaster and his animal he had met on his way into the camp. Surely the perimeter would be guarded at night, probably more so than it was during the day. Brisbane remembered the large kennel he had heard and seen and imagined all those trained dogs ready to chase him down and rip out his throat. One of them had already smelled him. One of them already knew his scent. He knew it was foolish to think he could outrun trained dogs, even if he got lucky and made it through the perimeter guards. If only he had some kind of weapon to protect himself. If only he had—

Brisbane stopped in his tracks just like the flow of his thoughts. A chill swept through him and rattled around in his vertebrae for as many as five full seconds. Just what in the hells did he think he was doing? Even if he could kill the Dogmasters and their dogs just by looking at them, he couldn’t escape from the encampment yet. If he did, he would be leaving Angelika behind.

The thought seemed utterly foreign to Brisbane and for a moment he questioned if it could possibly be his. But of course it was. It was in his own head. Angelika was the greatest weapon in the world and with her, Brisbane had already overcome impossible odds and defeated monstrous evil. What could he do without her? He had to go back. She had promised him they would have their revenge on these orks if he was just patient and strong, and here he was running out at the first opportunity like a coward. He had to go back and wait for his chance to reclaim her.

I have to go back. I have to go back for Angelika. What am I without her?

And so Brisbane turned and silently made his way back through the settlement to the circus wagon where he had been caged. His reasons for doing so made quite a bit of sense to him at the time, although they might seem strange to the uninformed observer. The truth of the matter, a truth Brisbane would not discover for quite some time, was not that Brisbane refused to leave Angelika, but that Angelika refused to let Brisbane leave her. That was the kind of power she had. Angelika always managed to stay in the hands of the best warrior in the area and, right now, that warrior was Gildegarde Brisbane III.

Brisbane arrived back at the door of the circus wagon, the decision to stay now firmly planted in his brain. He turned the tumblers of the padlock with his little spell, climbed back into the wagon, and locked himself in again.

Smurch scrambled out of the straw. “What’s going on?”

“I can’t leave, Jack,” Brisbane said. “They’ve still got my sword.”

“Your sword?” Smurch said. “You came back for your sword?”

Brisbane nodded. “I came back for my sword.”

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Hillbilly’s Elegy by J. D. Vance

2026-03-09T07:00:00.000-05:00

Vance says this in his afterword.

I tried to lay my cards explicitly on the table in one of the later chapters of the book: I am a conservative, one who doubts that the 1960s approach to welfare had made it easier for our country’s poor children to achieve their dreams. But those of us on the Right are deluding ourselves if we fail to acknowledge that it did accomplish something else: it prevented a lot of suffering, and made it possible for people like Mamaw to access food and medicine when they were too poor, too old, or too sick to buy it themselves. This ain’t nothing. To me, the fundamental question of our domestic politics over the next generation is how to continue to protect our society’s less fortunate while simultaneously enabling advancement and mobility for everyone. We can easily create a welfare state that accepts the fact of a permanent American underclass, one where family dysfunction, childhood trauma, cultural segregation, and hopelessness coexist with some basic measure of subsistence. Or we can do something considerably more difficult: reject the notion of a permanent American underclass.

And to be fair to Vance, this is indeed the book that Hillbilly’s Elegy is -- an examination of the reality faced by the poor rural whites among whom Vance was raised.

But there is a larger problem with the book. It mostly avoids placing blame -- except when it comes to figuring out what to do next.

Let’s begin with “Mamaw.” This is Bonnie Vance, Vance’s grandmother, who more or less raised him instead of his drug-addicted mother, and Mamaw is an interesting set of contrasts in Vance’s narrative -- serving as a kind of marker for the shift in the cultural and political opinions of her class.

Political scientists have spent millions of words trying to explain how Appalachia and the South went from staunchly Democratic to staunchly Republican in less than a generation. Some blame race relations and the Democratic Party’s embrace of the civil rights movement. Others cite religious faith and the hold that social conservatism has on evangelicals in that region. A big part of the explanation lies in the fact that many in the white working class saw precisely what I did, working at Dillman’s. As far back to the 1970s, the white working class began to turn to Richard Nixon because of a perception that, as one man put it, government was “payin’ people who are on welfare today doin’ nothin’! They’re laughing at our society! And we’re all hardworkin’ people and we’re gettin’ laughed at for workin’ everyday!”

Interesting (to me, at least) is that the footnote on that last quote leads to Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland -- a much deeper dive into both the touchstones (real and manufactured) that brought about these changes. But Vance’s examination of Mamaw and her opinions has some distinct value beyond what Perlstein may have been able to convey.

At around this time, our neighbor -- one of Mamaw and Papaw’s oldest friends -- registered the house next to ours for Section 8. Section 8 is a government program that offers low-income residents a voucher to rent housing. Mamaw’s friend had little luck renting his property, but when he qualified his house for the Section 8 voucher, he virtually assured that would change. Mamaw saw it as a betrayal, ensuring that “bad” people would move into the neighborhood and drive down property values.

Despite our efforts to draw bright lines between the working and nonworking poor, Mamaw and I recognized that we shared a lot in common with those whom we thought gave our people a bad name. Those Section 8 recipients looked a lot like us. The matriarch of the first family to move in next door was born in Kentucky but moved north at a young age as her parents sought a better life. She’d gotten involved with a couple of men, each of whom had left her with a child but no support. She was nice, and so were her kids. But the drugs and the late-night fighting revealed troubles that too many hillbilly transplants knew too well. Confronted with such a realization of her own family’s struggle, Mamaw grew frustrated and angry.

This part seems key to me. Mamaw got angry -- not because the Section 8 recipient was unlike her, but because she was too much like her. And…

From that anger sprang Bonnie Vance the social policy expert: “She’s a lazy whore, but she wouldn’t be if she was forced to get a job”; “I hate those fuckers for giving these people the money to move into our neighborhood.” She’d rant against the people we’d see in the grocery store: “I can’t understand why people who’ve worked all their lives scrape by while these deadbeats buy liquor and cell phone coverage with our tax money.”

These views even seemed strange to Vance.

These were bizarre views for my bleeding-heart grandma. And if she blasted the government for doing too much one day, she’d blast it for going too little the next. The government, after all, was just helping poor people find a place to live, and my grandma loved the idea of anyone helping the poor. She had no philosophical objection to Section 8 vouchers. So the Democrat in her would resurface. She’d rant about the lack of jobs and wonder aloud whether that was why our neighbor couldn’t find a good man. In her more compassionate moments, Mamaw asked if it made any sense that our society could afford aircraft carriers but not drug treatment facilities -- like Mom’s -- for everyone. Sometimes she’d criticize the faceless rich, whom she saw as far too unwilling to carry their fair share of the social burden. Mamaw saw every ballot failure of the local school improvement tax (and there were many) as an indictment of our society’s failure to provide a quality education to kids like me.

Mamaw’s sentiments occupied wildly different parts of the political spectrum. Depending on her mood, Mamaw was a radical conservative or a European-style social Democrat. Because of this, I initially assumed that Mamaw was an unreformed simpleton and that as soon as she opened her mouth about policy or politics, I might as well close my ears. Yet I quickly realized that in Mamaw’s contradictions lay great wisdom. I had spent so long just surviving my world, but now that I had a little space to observe it, I began to see the world as Mamaw did. I was scared, confused, angry, and heartbroken. I’d blame large businesses for closing up shop and moving overseas, and then I’d wonder if I might have done the same thing. I’d curse our government for not helping enough, and then I’d wonder if, in its attempts to help, it actually made the problem worse.

Radical conservative or social Democrat. This seemingly illogical tension Vance saw in his Mamaw is the tension that pervades much of his work.

As a younger man he became somewhat obsessed with the bigger question behind it. Why?

I consumed books about social policy and the working poor. One book in particular, a study by the eminent sociologist William Julius Wilson called ‘The Truly Disadvantaged,’ struck a nerve. I was sixteen the first time I read it, and though I didn’t fully understand it all, I grasped the core thesis. As millions migrated north to factory jobs, the communities that sprouted up around those factories were vibrant but fragile: When the factories shut their doors, the people left behind were trapped in towns and cities that could no longer support such large populations with high-quality work. Those who could -- generally the well-educated, wealthy, or well connected -- left, leaving behind communities of poor people. These remaining folks were the “truly disadvantaged” -- unable to find good jobs on their own and surrounded by communities that offered little in the way of connections or social support.

Wilson’s book spoke to me. I wanted to write him a letter and tell him that he had described my home perfectly. That it resonated so personally is odd, however, because he wasn’t writing about the hillbilly transplants from Appalachia -- he was writing about black people in the inner cities. The same was true of Charles Murray’s seminal ‘Losing Ground,’ another book about black folks that could have been written about hillbillies -- which addressed the way our government encouraged social decay through the welfare state.

Though insightful, neither of these books fully answered the questions that plagued me: Why didn’t our neighbor leave that abusive man? Why did she spend her money on drugs? Why couldn’t she see that her behavior was destroying her daughter? Why were all of these things happening not just to our neighbor but to my mom? It would be years before I learned that no single book, or expert, or field could fully explain the problems of hillbillies in modern America. Our elegy is a sociological one, yes, but it is also about psychology and community and culture and faith.

These are the kind of passages that seem most impactful in Vance’s work. The ones where he begins to move away from the frames of blame that dominate so much of American life, where he begins to look at problems for what they are instead of who caused them (the bugbearish mention of ‘our government’ notwithstanding).

But in another way, Vance seems to be simply posing. He’s describing the people he knows and he’s examining the things that make them think the things they think, but he’s also not suggesting any kind of solution to their problems.

Significant percentages of white conservative voters -- about one-third -- believe Barack Obama is a Muslim. In one poll, 32 percent of conservatives said that they believed Obama was foreign-born and another 19 percent said they were unsure -- which means that a majority of white conservatives aren’t certain that Obama is even an American. I regularly hear from acquaintances or distant family members that Obama has ties to Islamic extremists, or is a traitor, or was born in some far-flung corner of the world.

Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the president. But the president feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor -- which, of course, he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up: His accent -- clean, perfect, neutral -- is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they’re frightening; he has made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right -- adversity familiar to many of us -- but that was long before any of us knew him.

President Obama came on the scene right as so many people in my community began to believe that the modern American meritocracy was not built for them. We know we’re not doing well. We see it every day: in the obituaries for teenage kids that conspicuously omit the cause of death (reading between the lines: overdose), in the deadbeats we watch our daughters waste their time with. Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it -- not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right.

Insecurity and jealousy. Like Mamaw, Vance here (I think) accurately describes the malaise that threatens so many Americans and what they perceive as their way of life.

But how do we fix this problem? Do we educate? Do we subsidize? Do we empower? Sadly, Hillbilly’s Elegy contains no prescriptions. It is only a kind of diagnosis.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton by Jane Smiley

2026-03-02T07:00:00.000-06:00

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date.

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One of those book-of-the-month club selections that I just got without knowing what it was about or who Jane Smiley was. I enjoyed it. It’s set in the 1850s and tells the story of Lydia Harkness Newton, a young woman who marries an abolitionist and moves to Kansas Territory just as the violence erupts there before the start of the Civil War. It does a very good job telling the story of that time from all points of view, including those of the slave holders:

Don’t you think that’s a terribly hard religion? I know it comes from that, but Papa said none of our family were Puritans like that, that the Puritans were hateful people, and even the Dutch couldn’t stand them, and so that’s why they had to go to the New World, not because they were persecuted, but because they were hateful. And I don’t think it’s fair that they should come to New England and that our people should come to Virginia, an utterly different sort of place, and that in the end, they should put their hatefulness and hard religion over on the rest of us, after all! And you know what? It was those very people that started the slave trade, just to get rich. They treated those slaves much more horribly on those ships than ever Papa or Mr. Harris would treat even a dog, even a rat! Papa said they used to have more slaves in Newport, Rhode Island, than anywhere else in the United States, until the Irishmen came in, and it was cheaper to pay the poor benighted Irishmen, who don’t know any better because of their religion, nothing and get rid of having to care for your slaves as a proper master does!

A lot of slave owners treated their slaves well and a lot of slaves, in the context of their bondage, were very well treated. In Smiley’s exploration, it becomes clear that it is not slave owners who are evil, but slavery itself, as a slave under the kindest keeper is still a prisoner who will seek escape, as the character of Lorna did, and, who, when caught, will be exposed to all the bestial delights of the “catchers,” a profession that draws the lowest sort of individuals, but a necessary one nonetheless.

Unlike a lot of characters in fiction, Lidie is someone I actually came to care about. When her husband and prize horse are killed by some Missouri border ruffians and she goes on a vengeance quest, disguising herself as a man and infiltrating the land of her enemies, it is a quest I actually want to see succeed. It doesn’t, of course. It wouldn’t be the novel it is if Lidie got to extract her vengeance from the men who wronged her.

I made up my mind that revenge was more complicated then I had thought it would be, but then so was everything else one looks forward to with confidence.

Lidie is a reflective soul, coming up with her share of aphorisms like this, but all well preserved within the flow of the narrative.

People in the west made a big house of words for themselves and then lived inside it, in a small room of deeds.

And:

But children can be very early taught, that their happiness, both now and hereafter, depends on the formation of habits of submission, self-denial, and benevolence.

This last is not from Lidie herself, but from a book she is familiar with -- A Treatise on Domestic Economy, for the Use of Young Ladies at Home by Miss Catherine E. Beecher -- which Lidie refers to throughout the novel and which provides a contextual quote at the beginning of each chapter. Thanks to a little Internet research, I know now that Catherine is the sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who put her sister’s talents for domestic economy to good use, by asking her to take over the housekeeping while she finished Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

2026-02-23T07:00:00.000-06:00

FARCHRIST TALES

BOOK THREE:

THE UNDERGOD

The owner of The Quarter Pony was a middle-aged man by the name of Otis Parkinson and he hired my mother, Amanda, scant minutes after she entered the tavern. The job was that of a waitress, called serving wench in some circles, and came with a room in the back of the tavern, one meal a day, and a small salary. Some men in Otis’s place may have hired the young Amanda out of desire for her beauty, and then tried to abuse their position when she became dependent upon them. But not Otis Parkinson. He was a good man of Grecolus and hired her simply because she was in need and he needed the help. If someone had told him that day he would wind up married to the young girl, he would have laughed in their face. At that time, he did not know my mother was pregnant, he did not know her child would be a boy, and he did not know he would raise me as he would his own son.

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Night fell over the ork encampment slowly, oozing into the blue sky like molasses. Brisbane was free of his bonds but still a prisoner in the circus wagon. The party of orks had finally left him alone, losing interest in his inactivity and moving onto more stimulating pastimes.

Brisbane was thankful for their departure. He hated their eyes boring into him as they seemed to do, but this relief was lost among his infinity of worries. His hunger, his pain, his fear, they were old worries but they still packed a punch. The worst was that he could do nothing about any of them, and he had to take them in like unwanted visitors and try to make them comfortable. The orks were in control of him and he would not eat until they fed him, would not lose his pain until they stopped hurting him, and would not conquer his fear until he escaped them. He sat himself in one of the far corners of the wagon and tried not to give up hope.

Revenge, Angelika had promised. Revenge. But now even Angelika was gone, lost somewhere in the orkish cave and Brisbane wondered if he would ever wield her again. He tried to reach out to her mentally but he got no response. She was either unable or unwilling to speak to him. He wasn’t sure which one was worse.

He thought about Wizard, the strange ork in the strange clothes who had de-magicked his wagon. He thought about the things the ork had said. He was the only one Brisbane had heard use the common tongue, and Brisbane supposed it was a rare talent among orks. Wizard had really said very little to him, but what he had said left a lot of questions in his mind.

First of all, who or what was He-Who-Watches? Wizard had referred to his magic power as something granted by He-Who-Watches. A mark. There was only one explanation he could find that made any sense, but he distrusted it because it fell too easily in with the rumors he had heard about orks.

There were two schools of thought about orks. The first was that they were simple savage animals on two feet who killed because they liked the taste of blood. The second, and by far the more popular, was that they were simple savage animals on two feet created by Damaleous who killed to serve their lord and because they liked the taste of blood.

The question was, was He-Who-Watches Damaleous? Brisbane decided he very well could be. Even though he had come to discount most, if not all, of what he had been taught about Grecolus and his battles with the Evil One, Brisbane realized thousands believed it and, to thousands, it was a very real force in their lives. He did not begin to believe himself to be the ultimate judge between fact and fiction, but he knew the objective reality of fact often had little to do with the normal person’s subjective reality of fiction.

He considered Illzeezad Dantrius to be a prime example. Roystnof had taught Brisbane magic came from the individual, and Brisbane believed that, but Dantrius—and sometimes, it seemed, the rest of the world—believed magic came from Damaleous. Dantrius may be getting his powers from within, but he believed they were coming from below, and that was the only “fact” that mattered.

He could not help but wonder if the same story applied to these orks. From his words, it seemed Wizard believed his power and Brisbane’s potential power came from an entity called He-Who-Watches. Brisbane did not consider it too far of a stretch to imagine He-Who-Watches was just the orkish name for Damaleous. It was a different culture, they had a different language, and so they had different names for things. It was much like the time Brisbane had speculated about Shortwhiskers’ Moradin and Abbathor being the dwarven names for Grecolus and Damaleous. But if this was true for orks, and He-Who-Watches was what they called Damaleous, what did they call Grecolus? Did they even have a Grecolus-figure in their myths?

This tied into another debate he had once had with himself about the subjectivity of good and evil. Evil was good to the evil-minded. If the orks did worship a Damaleous-figure in the name of He-Who-Watches, wouldn’t that figure be their Grecolus-figure? It certainly might.

If all of this were true, which he still wasn’t sure it was, if orks could get magic powers from this He-Who-Watches, there seemed to be only one question of vital importance to his evolving philosophy. Was He-Who-Watches just the orkish name for Damaleous, or was he some other entity altogether? In essence, was the mythology he had been taught as a child the absolute truth, was it part of a larger whole, or was it a gigantic delusion?

The faithful worshippers of Grecolus considered theirs to be the only true god, all others were false gods based on ritual and superstition. The dwarves, and maybe the orks, had separate gods from those of humans and the other races, but they did not deny the presence of gods different from theirs. Roystnof, and a few like him, believed in a universe with no gods. It was very important to Brisbane to know which of these three ideas, if any, was the true one and, now that he was their prisoner, which idea the orks held.

He decided he simply did not know enough about the orks to gather any details about their mythology. He did feel, however, he could be sure Wizard believed his magic power came from a being called He-Who-Watches, whether that belief was realistic or not. As far as deciding the true nature of the universe, Brisbane didn’t think he would ever collect enough data to make a definite decision about that.

So he turned his thoughts to Wizard’s magic power. Regardless of its source, was it real? He could think of only one way to find out. He would test Wizard’s anti-magic spell by trying to cast a spell of his own.

He knew exactly which one he wanted to try. It wasn’t his only true spell, shocking grasp. That would be too obvious. It was one of the cantrips Roystnof had taught him early in his apprenticeship. Brisbane had been thinking about casting it since he had been tossed into his cage. In the middle of his sorrow, as he was pushed face first into the dirty straw on the floor of the cage, his ears had heard a sound that had brought a ray of sunshine into his cloudy hopes. It was a sound the orks may have thought would help break their prisoner’s spirit, but it had the opposite effect. It was the sound of Vrak’s key turning in the lock on the door of his cage.

A key meant the lock had tumblers, and tumblers Brisbane could turn much like the ones he had turned on Roystnof’s study door when he had cast his first cantrip almost six years ago.

But not now. There were still too many orks up and about. In fact, a number of the armored orks had built a campfire right outside his cage, before the cave entrance, and were eating their evening meal and drinking large amounts of what appeared to be ale. When they had all drunk themselves into unconsciousness, Brisbane would try his spell and, if it worked, he would slip out of the camp and run for it.

But right now, something much more pressing than freedom held his attention. Hunger. He sat dismally in his cage and watched the orks gorge themselves on freshly cooked rabbit meat and gallons of orkish ale. This evening meal seemed to be the only one the orks ate in a day, but they ate enough to make up for it. Brisbane had never eaten rabbit before, but right then, he thought he would have eaten one raw.

One of the orks around the fire Brisbane recognized as Floppy, but he acted as if he had never seen Brisbane before. They ate with reckless abandon and didn’t seem to care that there were people starving not thirty feet from where they sat.

He could hear the other prisoners in the other circus wagons begging and whining for food. He did not want to beg his captors for anything, but he felt if he was not fed soon, he would start uncontrollably. He listened to the moans of his fellows captives in misery. There were perhaps three or four of them and one of them was definitely female. The other voices were male, probably belonging to merchants who had traveled on the South Road between Scalt and Queensburg. In his mind, he saw all kinds of torture the orks could inflict on their prisoners, male and female alike. He thought about things females were especially susceptible to. What did these orks do to their female prisoners? Brisbane tried not to let his rumor-riddled imagination run away with him.

Why didn’t the King do something about these orks? The Windcrest Hills were part of the valley that made up the Farchrist Empire. These orks terrorized and captured honest merchants using the King’s roads to ply their trade, and kept them in cages to be tortured or eaten or worse. How could the King stand for that? Brisbane remembered the tax collector who had come to The Lazy Dragon in Queensburg had been accompanied by armed guards. Apparently, the King conducted his business under protection but did not care as much about other people’s business. Brisbane had never been a great student of politics, but he thought the least a system of government should do was protect its citizens from outside aggression.

He continued to watch the orks as they ate and drank, trying to block out the cries of the other humans as he was sure the orks were doing. He noticed the orks had a servant of sorts among them, someone to cook their meat and pour them fresh mugs of ale, and that this servant was not an ork. He was not a human, either. Brisbane wasn’t sure just what he was.

As he watched the servant move around in the firelight, Brisbane could see he was dressed in plain gray clothing that bore no sign or decoration of any kind. He appeared human in the way of arms and legs and the shape of his body, but his face was another story. His ears were long and sharply pointed, and at first Brisbane thought he might be an elf because of this, but he quickly realized no elf could be this ugly. The servant’s forehead was low and sloping, and his dark eyes were set deep beneath a prominent brow line. His nose was large and long, but pushed in at the end, as if it was trying to stay out of the way of the unruly teeth that pushed out of his large mouth. None of them were pointed like the stout tusks of the orks, but he seemed incapable of fully closing his lips over them. Brisbane thought he looked more like a handsome ork than an ugly human.

The servant was besieged with gruff orders from the other orks and he just about flew around the campfire to cater to all their wishes. When he had them all full of rabbit and their mugs full of ale, Floppy nodded to him and waved his arm in the direction of the circus wagons. The servant quickly picked up a sack and a water jug and made his way over to them.

Brisbane went right up to the bars and watched the servant go to the wagon at the other end of the line. He took a cup out of the sack and poured it full of water. Brisbane had his face pressed between two bars so he could see what was going on. He noticed the cries of the other prisoners had stopped.

The servant handed the cup of water through the bars to a pair of shaking human hands, and then drew from the sack some of the dried strips of preserved meat Brisbane had been fed on his journey with Vrak. These too he handed through the bars. The servant waited for a minute or two, took the empty cup back, and then moved down to the next cage.

They were being fed! Brisbane’s stomach nearly screamed in anticipation as he watched the servant make his way down the line. When he arrived in front of Brisbane’s wagon, Brisbane backed a step away from the bars and sat down in the dirty straw.

He met the servant’s eyes for a moment and then the servant bent over to pour him a cup of water. He handed it to Brisbane through the bars and Brisbane promptly drank half of it, forcing himself to stop so he would have some left to wash down his meat. He got four strips, a banquet compared to the two he had been fed the night before. He ate them quickly, he couldn’t help himself, and soon all he had left was the half cup of water. He quickly drained that and handed the cup back to the servant.

Brisbane wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Thank you,” he said, not caring if the servant could understand him or not.

The servant showed no reaction. He picked up the sack and the water jug and began to make his way back to the campfire.

Suddenly, one of the orks made a very loud comment and the rest of the orks let out an explosive burst of laughter. The servant froze in his tracks. The ork who had made the comment, Brisbane did not recognize him, rose to his feet and made another one. This time, some of those who laughed also got to their feet and began to make their way over to the servant. The servant dropped the sack and the water jug and began to back up towards Brisbane’s cage, slowly shaking his head.

One of the approaching orks was Floppy and when he and his comrades got to the servant, they seized him, still laughing, and began to drag him to the door of Brisbane’s cage. Floppy produced a key, either a duplicate or given to him by Vrak, and opened the padlock securing the door. In an instant, the servant was face down in the straw and the door had been relocked. Floppy and the orks went back to the campfire, still laughing.

The servant pulled himself out of the straw in front of Brisbane. Brisbane felt compelled to say something to the servant, but he still didn’t know if he would be understood. The servant sat up and tried to brush some of the straw off his clothes.

“Are you okay?” Brisbane asked.

The servant hung his head low. “Yeah, yeah,” he mumbled. “I’m just fine.”

There was an accent but it wasn’t as harsh as Wizard’s.

“What was that all about?”

Another curt comment from outside followed by another surge of brackish laughter.

“Keep your voice down,” the servant said.

Brisbane lowered his voice to a whisper. “Sorry.”

“It’s a running joke with them,” the servant said quietly. “Every time they get a new prisoner, they toss me in with him to see how strong the resemblance is. They think it’s hysterical that I look more human than grugan.”

“Groo-gan?” Brisbane said, pronouncing the strange word carefully. Except for their comparative size, Brisbane didn’t they think looked anything alike.

“Grugan,” the servant nodded. “Orks. That’s what they call themselves.”

Brisbane raised his eyebrows. It never occurred to him that orks would call themselves anything else but orks. He had thought ork was an orkish word, but evidently that was not the case. It was just what humans called them. He wondered where the word came from.

“Well,” Brisbane said, “you’re no ork. Or grugan. What are you?”

The servant did not seem offended by Brisbane’s comment. “I am half-grugan. My mother was human.”

Orks and humans could mate? The idea interested and repulsed Brisbane at the same time. None of the rumor-spreading humans would ever believe that. It was too twisted. To them it would be like humans and wild dogs producing offspring. Unnatural and, as too many of them would probably say, against the laws of Grecolus.

Strange. If orks could mate with humans, Brisbane figured they had to be just another race of men. Stargazer was a half-elf, after all, and no one turned their nose up to her. And although Brisbane had never known any, he supposed half-dwarves were possible. What about half-elf and half-dwarf? Half-elf and half-ork? There were any number of possibilities.

“How…” Brisbane said, not sure how to phrase the question he wanted to ask. “How did…”

The servant held up a hand to stop Brisbane’s sputtering. “My mother was captured on a raid long ago. Normally, she would have been used and killed, but my father, who was then the chief of the clan, took a liking to her and let her live long enough for her to give birth to me. While he lived, I was treated with some respect, but he has since been deposed, and now I am just their freakish whipping boy.”

Brisbane listened carefully to the servant’s story. When he finished, the servant looked at Brisbane very strangely.

“What’s the matter?” Brisbane asked.

“I just realized you’re the first prisoner who has ever tried to talk to me,” the servant said. “The others always screamed and cowered in one of the corners of the wagon. They thought I was some kind of monster.”

“How did you learn the common tongue?” Brisbane asked.

“My father was Sumak. All Sumaks can speak the common tongue.”

“Soo-mack?” Brisbane said.

The servant nodded. “Sumak. It’s the grugan word for clan chief.”

“What’s going to happen to me?” Brisbane asked.

The servant looked around. The orks around the campfire seemed to have forgotten about their joke.

“Scared, aren’t you?”

“A little,” Brisbane admitted.

“You should be,” the servant said. “They’ve never captured anyone like you before. They didn’t know your kind even existed. Ternosh thinks you’re a fake and if you are, you’re going to be in serious trouble.”

“Ternosh?”

“The one in the red robes who spoke to you before. He’s the clan’s Grumak.”

“Groo-mack,” Brisbane said, finally stumbling across a word he recognized. “That’s what Vrak said when he saw this pendant around my neck. What does it mean?”

“It doesn’t translate well into the common tongue of humans,” the servant said. “It’s sort of a sorcerer-priest.”

Sorcerer-priest? Yes, that would be hard to translate into the common tongue. A sorcerer and a priest were, in effect, opposites, one serving Damaleous and the other serving Grecolus, according to popular beliefs. It would be like trying to find one word to describe something that was both white and black, old and young, or dead and alive. Brisbane’s language couldn’t handle it. Only the ork

—grugan—

word, Grumak, conveyed the entire idea.

“They think I’m a Grumak?”

“Ternosh doesn’t,” the servant said. “But he’s not taking any chances until he can find out for sure. They’ve never heard of a human Grumak, but you bear the symbol of one around your neck. As I said, if you do turn out to be a fake, Ternosh is going to be very angry at your sacrilege.”

Brisbane felt as if he was just on the verge of understanding what the servant was talking about. Evidently, the only magic that existed in the clan was that used by Ternosh the Grumak. The pentacle he wore around his neck was a symbol of magic in this culture as well as in his. And it was considered sacrilege for anyone to bear the symbols of a Grumak if they were not a Grumak. That was all pretty clear. What Brisbane didn’t like was the servant’s use of the word sacrilege. It denoted the Grumak was not just a sorcerer but, as the servant’s rough translation had indicated, he was part of their religion. And Brisbane knew how angry some people could get when you poked fun of their religion.

“Who is He-Who-Watches?” Brisbane asked.

The servant’s head popped up as if he expected it to be cut off where it was. He looked over at the orks, but some of them seemed to be bedding down for the night. None of them seemed to notice or care about the hushed conversation going on in the circus wagon closest to the cave mouth.

The servant turned back to Brisbane and lowered his voice even more. “He-Who-Watches is a name for the god of the grugan. His real name is Gruumsh One-Eye, and it is from him that Ternosh receives his power as a Grumak.”

“Gruumsh One-Eye?” Brisbane said so softly he wondered if the servant would even hear him.

“Yes,” the servant said. “And if you are a fake, never let a member of this clan hear you speak his true name. They would kill you most slowly. It is forbidden.”

Brisbane’s thoughts had been correct. He-Who-Watches was a deity the orks believed blessed certain followers with the power of magic. But he still couldn’t be sure it wasn’t really Damaleous the orks worshipped. Right now, however, Brisbane wondered if he shouldn’t be less concerned with just who gave Ternosh his powers and more concerned with whether or not the orks were going to brand him a fake. He could do a few tricks, but he did not know if his power would be enough to save his life. It all depended upon how strong the orks perceived his power to be.

“Do you think I’m a fake?” Brisbane asked.

The servant shrugged his shoulders. “It’s not up to me to decide. I believe you could be a Grumak, but I tend to have a higher view of humans because of my heritage. The real test will come tomorrow.”

Brisbane was glad the servant was being so honest and open with him. There was plenty more he wanted to ask.

“What’s your name?” Brisbane said.

“Smurch.”

“Smurch? Is that your first or your last name?”

“Neither,” Smurch said. “It is my grugan name.”

“Do you have a human one?”

Smurch shook his head. “My mother was killed when I was very young. I know no human names.”

“Mine’s Gil,” Brisbane said. “Would you like one?”

“What would you suggest, Gil?”

Brisbane studied Smurch’s face for a moment. “Jack. You look like a Jack.”

“Jack Smurch,” the half-ork said, testing the air with it. “I like the way that sounds.”

Brisbane could not help but laugh a little.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Armageddon’s Children by Terry Brooks

2026-02-16T07:00:00.000-06:00

So, quick story. Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara is the first book I remember reading. I mean, I obviously read other books before that, but The Sword of Shannara is the first book that grabbed me, that I can still remember characters from (Panamon Creel, anyone?), and that perhaps set me off on this literary journey that I’m still on. I’m going to guess that I was fifteen years old.

I remember reading The Elfstones of Shannara shortly thereafter, and I remember waiting anxiously for The Wishsong of Shannara to be published -- which came out in 1985, when I would have been seventeen years old.

I also read a few of Brooks’s “Magic Kingdom of Landover” books -- definitely the first, and maybe The Black Unicorn and Wizard at Large as well. But that’s about it. For one reason or another, I fell out of the habit of reading Brooks -- probably when I fell away from fantasy novels in my mid-twenties.

One day I was reminiscing about all of this and I decided to check out what Brooks might have written since those days, and -- my word. He sure has been busy. Shannara, it seems, has turned into an entire literary universe, with many novels taking place both before and after the events of the original trilogy.

And then I thought, hey, wouldn’t it be fun to read all those books in “chronological” order? Not in their order of publication, but in the order of that universe’s own chronology -- including re-reading my beloved original trilogy somewhere in the middle.

So I went to the Internet and found the list -- Shannara books in chronological order -- and that told me to read the “Genesis of Shannara” series first, beginning with its first volume, Armageddon’s Children.

Except, Armageddon’s Children is not the first story in this long tale. As I read it I kept coming across references to an even earlier story -- implicit in references to characters like Nest Freemark and John Ross -- characters who don’t really feature in the “Genesis of Shannara” series, but who seem to preface it, to help construct the world in which Armageddon’s Children takes place.

And so, it was back to the Internet and the discovery of Brooks’s “The Word and the Void” series, which is a trilogy that predates the “Genesis of Shannara” series, and which begins, pretty much, in our present day world.

By this time, I was already deep into Armageddon’s Children, so I decided to finish reading it, but then to jump back to the first novel in “The Word and the Void” series, Running With the Demon, and properly start my chronological Shannara adventure there.

I’ll blog about Running With the Demon soon, but as far as Armageddon’s Children is concerned, it was a relaxing read. Brooks’s prose was eerily familiar to me, and the care that he shows for his characters -- both the heroes and the villains -- was wonderfully present.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch

2026-02-09T07:00:00.000-06:00

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date.

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A friend gave me this book and I found it a fairly good read.

It’s about this man who is having an affair on his wife, who then finds out that his wife is having an affair on him and wants a divorce. His life begins to fall apart after that as we discover all kinds of hidden secrets about the lives of those around him. His wife’s lover is also having an affair with his own sister, and his wife and his girlfriend are both having affairs with his brother.

It’s a tangled and complicated tale, but it held my attention both because of the prose style and because throughout all the ups and downs the characters more or less maintain stilted and phony cordial relations with one another.

I took it to be a book at least partly about the need to maintain certain appearances in society, even when the dirty reality beneath it all is a whole other matter.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

2026-02-02T07:00:00.000-06:00

FARCHRIST TALES

BOOK THREE:

THE UNDERGOD

Amanda took my father’s advice to leave the City Beneath the Castle. She left the very next day, after the body had been found and as the town began to buzz about the possible scandals and reasons for the death of one of their finest. She heard many rumors, some of which were shockingly close to the truth and others that could only have been made up by a madman. It was a warm sunny day when my mother fled from the city of her birth to seek anonymity in one of the smaller hamlets of the Farchrist Empire. She took everything she could pack onto one stubborn mule she had bought from a family friend for three silver pieces and headed out on the North Road. She spent a night in Ladysmith, but decided it was too close to home, and moved on the next day on the East Road. The next town was a small one called Scalt and, as she rode through it, she saw a sign in the window of a small tavern. She tied her mule to the hitching post, took down the sign, and went into The Quarter Pony to start a new life.

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Brisbane was kicked awake by Snaggletooth a few minutes after dawn. The ork grumbled at him and roughly helped him to his feet. The night on the ground had left him even more stiff and sore, and he could still feel the tautness in his face that could only be swelling. The orks had either already eaten breakfast or had skipped that meal because they were all packed and ready to continue on their journey. Within thirty seconds of being kicked awake, Brisbane was back in his position in the line-up, fighting with the rope that connected his feet to match the tireless pace of the orks. He did not remember the dream he had the night before.

He was miserable in the early morning sun. He felt terrible, his entire body one massive ache with small regions of flaring pain, one in his stomach, another in his face, and the last in the small of his back, where Snaggletooth had delivered a particularly swift kick. His hands had gone numb again and his twisted shoulders were beginning to develop a numbness of their own. He felt like he was choking on his gag and the rag in his mouth had lost all of its moisture during the night. It now tasted like dust.

But his physical misery was nothing compared to his mental anguish. Brisbane simply did not see how he was going to survive another day of the forced march. His hunger had returned with the morning, but unlike the sunrise, it seemed larger than it had been the day before. Knowing the orks, he could expect no food until they camped again for another night, and his stomach complained loudly that was much too far away. The hunger left him strapped of all his energy, and he wondered how much longer he would be able to shamble along like a zombie freshly returned from the grave.

For the first time he found himself wondering why he hadn’t just died when he plunged over the falls above the lost temple of Grecolus. The thought entered his head for the first time and it was quickly followed by the angry, and yet somehow still pacifying, voice of Angelika.

—No! Do not entertain such thoughts, Brisbane. You and I are destined for better things.—

He raised his head and fixed his reddened eyes on his sword, still being carried in the eternal clutches of Snaggletooth.

Angelika, he thought. I just don’t know how much farther I can go.

—There’s not much farther to go, Brisbane. Our journey will end today.—

It will? How much farther is it? How do you know?

—I know.—

It helped Brisbane a little. Today. If he could stay up just for today. Sometime today the hell would end. It was enough to keep his mind pushing his body ever onward. It did not ease his pain like, say, a healthy rub of Stargazer’s healing ointment—oh dear Grecolus, do you remember that stuff, it was in your former life, you spread some on Roystnof’s back after the attack of the ogres and the bruises faded a little right before your very eyes, do you remember that, Gil, can you remember that—might have, but it allowed him to endure the pain for a little while longer. He did not concern himself with where he was going to be and what was going to happen to him when he got there. He didn’t care. He only knew that before he had been lost in an eternity of one foot in front of the other, and now, there was the promise that this eternity wasn’t an eternity after all. It was just a long time. He knew because Angelika had told him so.

And so he was able to push on. He drove his body to the point of exhaustion, and then he drove it a little farther. He had to stay up just for today. Today this madness would end.

Snaggletooth and the other orks did not notice any superhuman effort coming from their prisoner. They knew where they were going and how long it would take to get there. The human was just extra baggage. They were glad he had given them as little trouble as he had. They were only concerned about getting home, and when they got there, the big human with the star around his neck would no longer be their responsibility. For them, it would be feast, drink, and old stories around a hot fire.

Brisbane did not care how she knew it, but Angelika had been right. His forced march ended that day. It was in the afternoon, far past noon but still early enough not to be troubled with finding a place to camp for the night. The sounds of bustle and activity could be heard from a long way off, but Brisbane was walking in a stupor of deaf ears, and he had no idea they were approaching the orkish settlement until he was brought to a halt by the ork holding onto his dead arms.

He looked up. He saw Snaggletooth had stopped and he was talking to an ork he had never seen before. This new one was also dressed in a mismatched set of black armor and he carried a shield with a large red eye painted upon it. He had a sword belted at his side and in his free hand was the leash of a dog, the breed of which Brisbane had never seen before.

It was a large animal, about as high as the ork’s waist at the shoulder with fur speckled in black, gray, and white like the fine grains of sand on a beach. It had a short snout and tall ears. Its eyes were bright orange and its teeth glistened white, wet with spittle. The dog was sitting at attention beside its ork master, growling deep in its throat.

Snaggletooth and the Dogmaster were exchanging what sounded like pleasantries in their brackish language. Brisbane wasn’t really paying attention to the sounds of their speech, but he seemed somehow attuned to the word groo-mack and, at its mention, he saw the Dogmaster begin to look him over suspiciously.

Snaggletooth then held Angelika up for the Dogmaster’s examination but he did not give the weapon to the ork. Talking all the while, Snaggletooth pointed out the large emerald in the base of Angelika’s pommel and then tried unsuccessfully to draw her from her scabbard. From a forgotten place deep inside of him, Brisbane’s wrath began to build at the sight of the ork handling the sword, but Angelika’s voice quickly echoed in his brain and calmed the tremors.

Snaggletooth and the Dogmaster talked for a little while longer and then the Dogmaster walked his dog down the length of their line, stopping beside each person to let the dog sniff them over. The dog approached Brisbane first, still growling low in its throat. Under other circumstances, he might have been embarrassed when the dog came up to him and sniffed at his crotch, but in his present condition, he just added it to the list of his personal tragedies since he had left his friends. Some of the orks laughed when the Dogmaster had to forcefully pull the animal away from Brisbane.

The other orks extended their hands before the dog got close enough to invade their private areas. The dog reacted favorably to each of the orks and, after the initial sniffing had been taken care of, each ork gave the dog a friendly pat on the head. The Dogmaster then returned to the head of the line and Snaggletooth slapped him on the back, barking out what could only have been a warm goodbye. Brisbane was shoved forward again.

The party continued over the rise of another hill and Brisbane thought about what he had just experienced. It had obviously been some sort of checkpoint, to control the flow in and out of wherever it was they were going. That was interesting in itself, that the orks would be organized enough to post and maintain such a patrol. It was the kind of thing that required strong leadership to work properly. It was the kind of thing one would expect to find around a fortification like Farchrist Castle, but it was a bit remarkable to find it out here in the wastes of the Windcrest Hills among a group of orks. But what really caught his attention was the dog, and more directly, the Dogmaster.

The domestication of animals was something Brisbane was sure most people would have put past the ability of an ork. Most people thought of orks as little more than animals themselves. But the Dogmaster had definite control over his animal. He remembered the way the dog had sat, seemingly at attention, while its master chatted with Snaggletooth about him and Angelika. That dog had not just been domesticated; it had been trained, probably to do much more than to sniff at the genitals of strangers. At every turn, Brisbane was seeing that these orks were much more than most people thought they were. He decided most people were full of shit.

The small group topped the hill they were climbing and started down its other side. Brisbane saw ahead of him, sprawled in a short valley amidst a high group of rocky hills, the large extent of the ork settlement.

It seemed to have little organization. There were a few ramshackle buildings scattered over the village, the most notable being what was obviously a kennel of some sort, giving its function away by the barks of dozens of fenced-in dogs. Figures moved randomly around the settlement, concentrated the thickest around the buildings. The settlement seemed to grow more dense as it neared the sheer side of the hill on the opposite side of the compound. The hill appeared to have been cut off by some mechanical means and a large cave mouth had been dug into it. Periodically, figures moved in and out of this cave mouth, and he could only assume the orks had some sort of underground complex in there.

As he was marched down the hill and into the settlement itself, Brisbane lost sight of his overview of the area and began to see more and more detail. Most of the orks moving about were dressed in ordinary, if dirty, clothing, but a few among their ranks wore the typical set of black ork armor. Of those in regular clothes, females were by far more numerous than males. They looked a lot like their male counterparts, big and solidly built, having snouts and tusks smaller than those of the males and less hair around their faces and necks. But they were most easily distinguished from the males by the large pair of breasts each of them seemed to have, pushing out the fabric of their dirty tunics. As Brisbane looked around, he did not see a single female with anything near to what would be considered normal for a human female. Some were almost freakish in their proportions.

Nearly all the females were engaged in some kind of handiwork. Mending clothes, preserving meat, or cleaning weapons, they all seemed to have some task to perform. Each of them also seemed to have a small litter of orkish children dancing around them, making a good deal of noise and doing their best to turn the attention of the females away from their work. As Brisbane was led through the settlement, the children paused in their activities to watch him walk by, their eyes wide with avid interest, only to lapse back into their foolishness after Brisbane had passed.

He also saw a number of small tents scattered between the few buildings. Their front flaps were open but he saw almost no one sitting inside any of them. The day was warm, and Brisbane figured they would stay empty until nightfall, when it would be necessary to put all the unruly children to bed.

His impression of the settlement as a whole was one of order amidst chaos. Out here in the wilderness the orks had obviously carried on a productive society for some time. There seemed to be no logic in the layout of the area—buildings, tents, and people scattered any which way—but in the actions of the men and women he had witnessed so far, Brisbane could see each ork had a job to do in their society and each ork did that job well.

These perceptions did not rattle off in his head like a lecture in sociology, he was in much too much physical distress for that. But the inklings of them were there, tugging away at the fringes of his conscious thoughts, reinforcing his idea that these orks were much more than anyone had given them credit for being.

After marching Brisbane through the center of the village, Snaggletooth stopped him when they arrived within a hundred feet of the cave mouth Brisbane had seen from the distance. There were many more armored orks in this area, all of them male and all of them carrying shields with the red eye symbol. Lined up next to the cave mouth, radiating out away from the small cliff face, were a row of structures that, from the distance, Brisbane had thought were just another group of run-down buildings. They were not. They were familiar for he had seen such things dozens of times in his life, but they seemed out of place here in the ork settlement. They were circus wagons.

There were five of them, lined up like a train, the hitchings for a team of horses laying uselessly on the ground and extending under the raised floor of each one’s neighbor. They were not the happy, colorful models, the ones used to transport the circus people from town to town in relative comfort. They were instead the ones used to transport dangerous animals, constructed of heavy wood with two walls of thick iron bars to cage the animal apart from innocent onlookers. They were not derelicts. They were being used by the orks to cage animals, and those animals were human beings.

Brisbane suddenly began to fight against his bonds and his captors. The ork who had control of him from behind, Brisbane thought it was Floppy, held firmly onto him and cruelly twisted his arms, forcing him toward the circus wagon closest to the cave mouth. Had Brisbane been rested and healthy, he might have been able to wrench himself free from Floppy’s grasp, but in his weakened condition, it was no contest. He was pushed steadily and painfully forward.

Snaggletooth took a key off a hook driven into the wood of the wagon and opened the padlocked door on its front. There was a small window in this door, guarded by small iron bars, which must have once been used by the circus masters to look in on their animals. When Snaggletooth had the door open, Floppy wrestled Brisbane up a step or two and drove him into the circus wagon.

The floor was covered with dirty straw and he stumbled face first into it. Before he could rise to his feet, Brisbane heard the door shut behind him and the locking of the padlock. Snaggletooth came around to the side of the wagon and he waved the key mockingly in front of Brisbane’s swollen face. The ork then clipped it to a ring at his belt and then, with Floppy and Half-Pint and the other two orks in his charge, disappeared into the cave mouth.

The other orks in black armor who stood around the area each looked Brisbane over for a while, but they kept their distance and did not pester him. They muttered amongst themselves, but their voices were low and, even if he could have understood their language, he would not have heard what they said. Brisbane tried to ignore them as he mentally went over his situation.

It did not look good. Here he was, hurt, tied, and gagged, locked in a circus wagon deep inside an ork encampment. He did not know where his friends were and he could expect no help from them. The only orks he knew by sight were the ones who had captured him, and they thought he was some kind of wizard. They had gone into the cave with his sword, surely to report to their superiors, and he did not know when they were coming back and who they would bring with them.

That was the down side. If there was any up side at all, Brisbane supposed it would be that he was still alive. The orks had beaten and starved him, but they had taken great pains to capture and bring him here alive. They obviously wanted something from him, and as long as Brisbane withheld it, he would retain his life if not his freedom. The problem was he did not know what the orks wanted.

His thoughts suddenly turned to those of the other people here in the orkish prison. He was alone in his wagon, but he had seen other humans in the other cars. He wished he could remove his gag so he could talk to them, so he could gain some kind of solace in the company of misery, but with his hands tied behind his back, it was impossible. Who were they? How had they been captured? What were the orks doing with them? Did the orks eat them as Shortwhiskers had said? Use them as slaves? Had any of them ever escaped? Could any of them help him? He had so many questions and so few answers.

Some of the orks still watched him, but they did not approach or try to communicate with him, and Brisbane soon found himself with little else to do besides wait. He tried to make himself comfortable in the dirty straw, but his injuries and hunger made it difficult. How did this ever happen to him? It seemed that one moment he had been standing in the hand of Grecolus, looking into the nest at the two eggs and the dead ork, and the next he was being tied up with Snaggletooth on his back. The attack of the bird-monster had been so swift he barely remembered it happening. Its dark shape had appeared like a vision, slammed into him, and knocked him from his perch in less than a second. The fall to the lake and over the falls was a wet smear on his memory, and somewhere along the way he had lost consciousness. It was terrifying to think his life could change so drastically in such a short period of time. It was as if he had no choice at all.

Brisbane did not know what was going to happen to him but Angelika had promised they would have their revenge on these orks if he would be patient and be strong. Well, he intended to do just that. In his position, Angelika’s promise was better than no promise at all, and Brisbane clung to it like a lifeline, a line to what his life had once been. If any part of it was up to him at all, he was going to get his old life back.

And so he sat there in the dirty straw, being patient and being strong, waiting for something to happen which he could control. He didn’t know how long he was going to have to wait in order to get his chance, but at that moment, he was ready to wait until the end of time.

Brisbane sat in his prison for about an hour before the orks took more than a passing notice of him. A group of the armored orks with the red eye shields began to gather in front of his wagon. They remained a respectable distance from him, but they were obviously waiting for something to happen.

That something was the re-emergence of Snaggletooth from the cave. The ork came striding out in the daylight—without Angelika, he left Angelika somewhere in that cave—followed by another ork whose appearance and dress were like nothing Brisbane had ever seen before. He was small for an ork, a little smaller than Half-Pint, and was dressed not in black armor or dirty rags, but in rich red robes. They flowed down the length of him with small sashes and belts of white to hold the many folds in place. He wore a small pointed cap between his two pig ears and his face and hair were immaculately clean. The ork wore a black patch over his left eye. Both the new ork and Snaggletooth came forward and stood directly in front of Brisbane’s cage.

The new ork, Brisbane being too shocked at his appearance to think up a name for him, studied Brisbane for many long minutes and then turned to Snaggletooth and muttered a few sentences to him. Snaggletooth nodded his head and slowly backed away from the new ork, stopping just before the gathered group of his black-armored comrades.

The new ork took a step closer to Brisbane’s wagon and planted his fists on his hips, pushing several folds of his robes away from his feet. He fixed his single eye on Brisbane’s face and, for the first time, Brisbane noticed the ork’s eye was red.

“Well now,” the ork said. “What do we have here? A wizard?”

It took Brisbane a moment to realize the ork had spoken in the common tongue, and not his orkish language. His teeth and lips gave the words a guttural accent, but they were understandable. Brisbane tried to say something to the ork but only mumbles could get past his gag.

The ork held up a placating hand. “No, no, please don’t try to say anything. You’ll just embarrass yourself. We know how to handle hostile prisoners, regardless of their personal powers.”

The ork had quite a command of the common tongue. No simple animal here. Brisbane saw his hopes of early escape slip down another notch. These orks were sharp.

“Personally,” the ork went on, “I don’t believe He-Who-Watches would grant the power to a member of a race as weak as yours, but as others have said, it is better to be safe than sorry.”

The ork then went silent and bowed his head. He raised his arms and began to growl in the back of his throat. At first, Brisbane could distinguish no difference between the growls of the ork and those of the dog they had met at the perimeter of the settlement. But as he listened more closely, he began to hear familiar tones and syllables in the ork’s low speech. It wasn’t common tongue and it didn’t sound like the orkish he had heard since his capture, and yet it was still familiar. It was—

With a shock Brisbane realized where he had heard some of the ork’s strange words before. He had heard Roystnof use them in his magical disciplines. The ork was casting a spell. Brisbane listened more carefully. He could only understand a fraction of the words, either due to his inexperience with magic or the ork’s harsh pronunciation.

But magic words were exacting. They had to be pronounced perfectly or they would not function. Indeed, the words Brisbane could understand were uttered correctly, so he had to assume the ork was using many words unfamiliar to him. It might even be a completely different kind of magic, like Roystnof had said Dantrius’ was. Brisbane began to get very nervous about just what may happen to him.

The ork was soon finished with his spell and he lowered his arms and raised his head. Brisbane looked at himself and his surroundings. He could discern no difference in him or them. The ork signaled to Snaggletooth and he came up to the front of Brisbane’s cage and drew his sharp knife.

“If you will turn around and slip your hands through the bars,” the robed ork said to Brisbane, “Vrak will now sever your bonds.”

Brisbane slowly did as he was told. Snaggletooth—Vrak, his real name is Vrak—slipped his knife between his wrists and, with one quick pull, cut the straps that had bound them together. Brisbane quickly moved away from the bars and began to massage his numb and swollen hands.

Vrak moved back to stand next to the robed ork, who Brisbane’s mind began to call Wizard.

“You may also remove your gag,” Wizard said to him. “It no longer matters. Any powers you might possess have been neutralized.”

Brisbane forced his aching fingers, rising from their comas with the flow of blood back into them, to undo the knot behind his head and he spat his gag out onto the floor.

“Wha—” he croaked, his voice failing him on his first attempt to use it. “What do you mean, neutralized?”

Some of the orks behind Wizard and Vrak seemed to shrink away from the scene and their mumbles grew louder.

Wizard looked at Brisbane as if he was an animal to be trained. “This is the first and last question I will answer for you. I have cast a spell over your cage so no magic will work there. If you really do have the mark of He-Who-Watches, I encourage you to attempt to call forth your power.”

Brisbane did nothing.

Wizard smiled. “I thought not. Tomorrow, you will answer my questions.” He turned with a flourish and went back into the cave with Vrak right on his heels.

Brisbane rubbed his aching hands and tried to ignore the group of orks who did not disperse with Wizard’s exit.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dialogues in Limbo by George Santayana

2026-01-26T07:00:00.000-06:00

This was a tough read. Sometimes I like to challenge myself with philosophy, but I often find that the idea of the challenge is more satisfying than the challenge itself.

In this volume, Santayana explores several philosophical issues through imagined dialogues with the “shades” of several ancient philosophers. It’s a neat device (obviously copied from older philosophical traditions), and one often gets the sense that Santayana knows his shades quite well. The bickering and back-and-forths between Democritus, Alcibiades, et. al., demonstrate a tight understanding of each of the philosophical traditions and viewpoints.

Of course, Santayana is present himself in the guise of a spirit of “a stranger still living on Earth,” and he is the one who winds up bringing in the most challenging questions.

Frankly, most of it blew right past me, but I did get a sense of something useful in the dialogues around “Autologos,” a kind of avatar for the man who believes that he is the author of his own destiny, a concept that most of the ancient shades disagree with, preferring to see the hand of “the gods,” or at least the unknown, in the ultimate and proximate motive forces within us.

Democritus. You, silent Stranger, do not follow the others on their festive errand, and have not to-day opened your lips. Perhaps you are offended at our enlightened religion.

The Stranger. Not offended, but helpless and envious, like a boy admiring from afar the feats of an athlete or the gleaming armour of soldiers on the march. It is rash to intrude upon the piety of others: both the depth and the grace of it elude the stranger.

Democritus. Religion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience; and yet religion, for all its poetic motley, comes closer than work-a-day opinion to the heart of things. In invoking the aid of the gods and in attributing all things to their providence and power, each of us shatters his greatest illusion and heals his most radical madness. What madness, you will ask, and what illusion? This: that his thoughts produce one another or produce his actions: the very illusion of Autologos. These young fops, dancing away to their mock mysteries, are ingenious sophists and pleasant companions, but they are utterly without religion; and if your heart held you back as if from sacrilege from following in their train, it did not deceive you. Autologos is the one perfect atheist: he is persuaded that he rules and creates himself. What madness! And yet how irresistible is the voice of sensation, and will, and thought, at every moment of animate existence! The open-mouthed rabble shouting in the agora suppose that nothing controls them but their pert feelings and imaginations, by miracle unanimous; and even the demagogue who is pulling the strings of their ignorance and cupidity facies that he is freely ruling the world, and forgets the cupidity and ignorance of his own soul which have put those empty catch-words into his bawling mouth. Miserable puppets! The most visionary of mystics is wise in comparison. He knows how invisibly fly the shafts of Apollo: let but the lightest of them cut the knot of the heart, and suddenly there is an end of eloquence and policy and mighty determination. He knows that it suffices for the wind to change and all the fleets of thought will forget their errand and sail for another haven. Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace. Admonished by religion, he gives thanks, acknowledging his utter dependence on the unseen, in the past and in the present; and he prays, acknowledging his utter dependence on the unseen for the future. He sees that the issue of nothing is in his hands, seeing that he knows not whether at the next moment he will still be alive; nor what ambushed powers will traverse his path, or subtly undo the strength and the loves in his own bosom. But looking up at the broad heaven, at returning day and the revolving year, he humbly trusts the mute promises of the gods, and because of the favour they may have shown him, he may trust even himself. For what is the truth of the matter? That the atoms in their fatal courses bring all things about by necessity, and that men’s thoughts and efforts and tears are but signs and omens of the march of fate, prophetic here, and there deceptive, but always vain and impotent in themselves, never therefore wise save in confessing their own weakness, and in little things as in great, in their own motions as in those of heaven, saluting and honouring the gods.

The Stranger. But can the atoms be called gods?

Democritus. As the sun is called Phoebus and the sea Poseidon, and the heart’s warmth Love, and as this bundle of atoms is called Democritus. The name is a name, and the image imaginary, yet the truth of it is true.

The Stranger’s question is a sneaky one -- driving right at the heart of Democritus’s argument -- and he as much as admits the sophistry in his response. Autologos is wrong not because it is the gods that drive him. He is wrong because he does not know what drives him -- the gods, the atoms, or even, dare I say, himself, since everything seems to be only a name that is placed on the hidden and unknown truth.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

You Are Being Lied To: This Disinformation Guide to Media Distortion, Historical Whitewashes and Cultural Myths edited by Russ Kick

2026-01-19T07:00:00.000-06:00

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date.

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This is one of those books that I heard about on NPR. It’s a collection of essays, articles and interviews with a bunch of counterculture types that pretty much purports to tell you that everything you think or hear about in the mainstream media is a load of crap. And of course, it pretty much is.

One of the most interesting things about the collection is that it was assembled in the pre-9/11 world, and so mention of the most colossal conspiracy theory in the history of mankind is nowhere to be found. And yet, reading this, you can see how such ideas begin and flourish. There’s a lot of people out there who evidently think Skull and Bones controls the world, and that all institutions support some dark and sinister purpose, even those run by people who have no clue what they’re talking about, they still unconsciously serve the bidding of the master. The people in this book really don’t like the War on Drugs, and believe that the criminalization of opiates is nothing more than the State’s way on controlling and monitoring the society. The State wants the power to relieve pain to only reside with itself, so it can decide when to use it and, more importantly, when not to use it.

Every tyrant knows that a person in pain will also reliably respond to the ‘positive’ reinforcement of relief from pain. The ability to offer that -- an escape from agony -- is a power no amount of money can buy.

Guess we’re ruled by tyrants now. The logic they seem to use is as follows:

1. Here’s something that’s going on in our society.

2. Here’s one way of interpreting that something.

3. The way that we’ve interpreted it coincides with ways tyrants have oppressed people in the past.

4. Therefore, our society must be being oppressed by tyrants.

The stuff in this book reminds me a lot of Brother Hovind. Wouldn’t it be great if that many pieces of the puzzle actually fit together? Forgot what they fit together into and whether that’s good or bad, right or wrong. Just the fact that they fit together is enough. Fitting the pieces together is all any of us ever need.

In any event, here are some books from their suggested reading list that I wouldn’t mind checking out:

The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold by Acharya S

Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit by Garry Wills

Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity by Bruce Bagemihl

The Myth of Human Races by Alain F. Corcos

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

2026-01-12T07:00:00.000-06:00

FARCHRIST TALES

BOOK THREE:

THE UNDERGOD

It was still raining when my father, Gildegarde Brisbane II, arrived at the edge of the cliff that held Farchrist Castle above the city below, Raveltown. His career as a Farchrist Knight ended in disgrace, he felt his life and purpose crashing down all around him. He loved Amanda, my mother, and that might have been worth living for if he hadn’t loved his god more. He looked out over the rainy expanse of the Sea of Darkmarine and offered a little prayer up to Grecolus. He did not ask for forgiveness. He did not ask for mercy. All he asked for was for it to end when his body crashed into the rocks so far below. After a life lived in devotion to Grecolus, in his last moments, he wanted no part of the afterlife the god offered him. His body was found the next day by a pair of young boys who had come to dig for clams.

+ + +

During the march forced upon him for the rest of the day, Brisbane decided the rumors he had heard about orks may not have mentioned their use of magic, but they had hit the nail on the head when it came to their brutality and downright meanness.

It took them many hours to come to the end of the dark tunnel that started in the ettins’ cave and bored down into the earth, sometimes at unbelievable angles. Brisbane spent the whole time lost in the pitch that surrounded him, his eyes never adjusting to the point where he could see anything. At times, he wasn’t sure if his eyes were open or closed.

His constant companion in the blackness was the pain, the pain that seemed to have intensified with the deprivation of his sight. His chest still labored for breath from the abuse his lungs had sustained in his near-drowning in the Mystic River. The pain in his stomach was dull and constant, and the left side of his face felt like it had swelled up to epic proportions. He started to cough, his face and his abdomen competing to see which could hurt him more when he did so, and he brought up something behind his gag that could only be blood by the way it tasted. Unable to spit it out, he was forced to choke the fluid back down.

He was a mess. One ork always had his hand clamped on his wrists and every time he staggered or slowed his pace, the ork would give him a shove that hurt his arms and caused him to trip over his own feet. Three times, he actually fell to the ground and had to be hauled back to his feet amidst the echoing sounds of what he could only assume were orkish curses.

Besides these orations, the orks were mostly silent as they made their way through the rock of the mountain. He tried to carry on some sort of mental conversation with Angelika, who Snaggletooth still carried in the darkness, but his mind was too preoccupied with his pain and Angelika was too preoccupied with their inevitable vengeance. She seemed unable to tell him anything else, nothing except warnings to be strong and promises of revenge. She knew nothing specific about his fate or the fate of his friends, and these were the two subjects he was most concerned with.

First, he had no idea what was to become of him. Shortwhiskers had said orks captured people to be slaves, for food, or for both. He hated to think Snaggletooth was taking him back to his village, or clan, or tribe, or whatever it was, to roast him over a slow fire until his juicy meat fell right off his bones. He supposed that could be his eventual fate, but he thought they would want something else from him first. Snaggletooth had been ready to kill him when he had finally gotten him off their ex-leader, but the ork’s sword arm had been stayed by the sight of his medallion. Groo-mack, Snaggletooth had said to his goons, and they had quickly tied him up and gagged him. They gagged him. That was something they hadn’t done the first time he was captured. They did it the second time, though, and very effectively. A balled-up rag had been stuffed in his mouth and a second one tied around his face to keep the first one in place. He could make no articulate sounds and his screams were muffled into whimpers.

Why did they gag him? Who could he call out to for help? There was no one here in the wilderness or in this tunnel beneath the earth. They may just not want to hear him jabbering, but he had a hunch it was something more than that. Something much more than that.

Groo-mack. It kept coming back to that. What did it mean? If a pentacle meant the same thing to orks it meant to humans, groo-mack could mean any number of things, all of them in the same vein. Magic and magic-using. Did Snaggletooth think he was a wizard? That would explain the gag. If they thought he was a hostile wizard, a gag would effectively prohibit him from speaking the proper vocal tones to cast spells. And his hands being tied prevented him from making the right hand gestures.

That had to be it. The truth of it hit home for him. It made sense. They thought he was some kind of wizard so they had tied and gagged him so he couldn’t cast any spells against them.

But he did not consider himself anything but the most paltry kind of wizard. His talent was confined to a small amount of cantrips, and his one offensive spell, shocking grasp. He certainly hoped the situation never came about where he would have to prove his magical skill to the orks. He could only imagine the orks would be disappointed with his performance.

But these thoughts were secondary in his mind. Foremost was concern over his companions’ welfare since he had left them on that platform atop the peak overlooking the mountain lake. His heart still fluttered over what the absence of Roystnof’s light spell might mean for him, but Roystnof was not the only one on his mind. He felt concern for Shortwhiskers and especially Stargazer. Hopefully, they would, or had already, survived the attack of that strange bird-monster. He was sure they could, if things had gotten really nasty, have easily retreated back into the endless corridor and escaped the monster.

They would come looking for him, he was sure of that. If able, they would come looking for him. Dantrius might not like it, but that had never stopped the party’s actions before. They would come looking for him—but what would they find? Shortwhiskers might be able to find the spot on the bank of the Mystic where his scuffle and capture had taken place, but then what? A guess to look in the ettins’ cave and a lucky discovery of the secret door they could not open without the magic orkish word? He had to accept the fact that he could not count on a rescue by his friends. He was going to have to orchestrate that himself. He had been effectively separated from his friends and any reunion they were ever going to have would only result if he stayed on his toes and took advantage of the first and smallest opportunity to escape his captors.

Roystnof, Shortwhiskers, and Stargazer—their faces flashed before his blind eyes and he tried not to moan out in desperation. Other faces flashed before him, people who had passed out of his life for reasons as different as their individualities. Roundtower, his mother, even Otis seemed to hang in the air before him with the solidity of regret. They all seemed so far away now, almost as if they had never really been, and he wondered if he would live long enough to forget them entirely. He wondered if he could live long enough to forget them entirely.

Angelika, are you sure?

—Strength and patience, young Brisbane. Vengeance shall be ours.—

These are the thoughts that filled Brisbane’s head when the pain of his injuries allowed him to think as he marched down the steep grade of the dark tunnel. They were not unusual things for a young man in his situation to be thinking, but an objective observer privy to his thoughts might have found two thoughts missing from his concerns a bit unusual.

The first was that even though he was in a cramped, dark tunnel, lost impossibly far under the pressing weight of tons and tons of mountain rock, he had no traces of the claustrophobia clouding his thoughts like he had experienced in the meditation chamber. A sympathetic voice might be able to explain this away by saying he had much more realistic threats to his health to worry about than the thought-induced paralysis that seemed to seize claustrophobics, and there aren’t many who would argue against this being the case. But it was not so easy to explain his seeming unconcern for his near-lunatic behavior when the ex-leader of the orks had taken Angelika away from him. Granted, Angelika was no ordinary sword, but it might profit one to speculate on what kind of hold she must have had on him to illicit such a reaction.

The small group spent many hours in the dark tunnel, slowly making their way down and through it. Brisbane began to wonder—like he had done not long before in a different place and what already seemed like a different life—if it would ever come to an end. Like all things, however, the tunnel eventually did end and it surprised him as endings often do. The orks suddenly brought him to a halt with a rough jolt. He still had trouble seeing his surroundings, and for the past few hours he had begun to rely on his other senses. His strangely sensitive ears heard Snaggletooth’s voice mumble another ursh-low and suddenly bright light stabbed into his eyes like knives. He tried to bring his hands up to cover them but his hands were still tied behind his back and he could only shut his eyelids and try to turn his head away from the light.

For a moment, he wondered if this was how Roundtower felt when Roystnof had transformed him from stone back to flesh.

He was pushed forward again and with his eyes closed he tripped over his own feet and nearly fell to the ground for the fourth time. He tried to open his eyes a crack and the light wasn’t as bad so he opened them a little more. Another secret door had been opened before him and through his half-masted eyelids he could see the door opened onto the outside.

The sun was out, warming the late afternoon sky as if it had never been raining. His eyes were quickly getting used to the light as he stepped out into the sunshine behind Snaggletooth. He could see they had exited the mountain at its base and now stood upon a sparse and hilly plain. The Windcrest Hills, he realized. They had cut through the heart of the Crimson Mountains and now stood on the southern edge of the Windcrest Hills. He had traveled through the mountains before, but that had been along the bank of the Mystic, and that river must have been leagues to the west. The orks were going to take him into the heart of the hills, to their home, their campsite, their village.

Before they moved on, Snaggletooth came over to Brisbane and forced him down onto the earth. He was speaking to his men as he did this, and when he got him down he took out a sharp-looking knife and pressed it against Brisbane’s throat. It felt sharp, too.

Another ork, this one whose pig ears didn’t seem to stand up like those of his comrades and whom Brisbane mentally named Floppy, brought out a length of thick rope and began to tie each end of it around one of Brisbane’s ankles. When Floppy was finished, his feet were connected with a sturdy rope not much more than a foot in length.

He was hauled back up to his feet, Snaggletooth putting his sharp knife away, and the day’s forced march continued. The rope prevented him from taking a full step and he was forced to hobble along on little stutter-steps. He dismally realized the rope snuffed out his hope of running for it if the orks ever left him unguarded for so much as a second. He had a hard enough time just trying to keep up with Snaggletooth’s walking pace like this. He couldn’t beat a cripple in a foot race. And besides, Floppy had retaken his place behind Brisbane, holding onto his bound arms. These orks were determined not to let him escape, and he guessed Snaggletooth had a lot more experience at preventing an escape than he had at effecting one.

The pain of his injuries continued to plague him as he was pushed over and around the Windcrest Hills, but new aches began to sneak up on him as well. His hands had gone numb in their constraints and the aches developing in his contorted arms would have made an arthritic wince. His legs were suffering too, the strange pace and cadence forced upon him was taking its toll in muscle spasms and strains. He felt like he could not go on for much longer.

But overshadowing all of this was the growing pang of hunger that seemed to have taken over his abdomen, moving in without permission and taking up more space than it deserved. Brisbane realized he hadn’t eaten since breakfast that morning, a cheery little meal he had shared with his friends before the entrance of the forgotten temple. It had been some simple warmed-over stew, what had been the staple of their diet since they had left Queensburg, but now it seemed like it had been a gourmet feast. He could only hope the orks would take off his gag long enough to feed him, but guessing at how much they would mistrust him if he were indeed a powerful wizard, he doubted he would receive much nourishment. He bit angrily at his gag and wondered if he would ever eat again.

The late afternoon amidst the hills was warm and still, and his unusual effort was beginning to make him sweat heavily. He saw Snaggletooth had a canteen at his belt, surely filled with clean water and surely acquired from some poor merchant the orks had ransacked on the road between Queensburg and Scalt. The dirty rag stuffed in his mouth had become saturated with his own saliva, and he could get some meager relief by sucking on it, but it was nothing compared to what ten seconds with Snaggletooth’s canteen would bring.

Being forced through that dark tunnel had been a walk in the park compared to marching under the sun with his feet tied together. He began to watch the sun, begging for it to move faster across the sky. He was sure the orks would take a break at sundown, or maybe even camp for the night, but this certainly came out of desperation and not any visible evidence. The orks did not seem to tire and they looked as healthy now as they had at the beginning. He tried not to let his mind entertain surely mad notions that orks were indefatigable and never needed to sleep.

His body, in its pain and discomfort, reached a point of separation from his mind and he began to lose the image of his surroundings. They did not matter. He could be walking through scrub land, in a forest, down the main street of a city, or even across the surface of the Sea of Darkmarine. All that mattered was that he was walking, walking, walking until Snaggletooth said it was okay to stop. He just hoped he could understand the ork’s order when it came.

As it turned out, Brisbane had no trouble understanding Snaggletooth when he finally called the procession to a halt. The sun was dipping into the eastern horizon, and the party was following the curve of a large hill, when Snaggletooth stopped. Floppy let go of his wrists and Brisbane walked a few more steps until he almost collided with Snaggletooth. He looked up and around, seeing they had stopped and he was no longer being held onto, but instead of making a mad, hobbling dash for it—something he might have tried two long hours ago—he dropped to his knees and slowly put his forehead on the hard, compacted earth in front of him.

He heard Snaggletooth and his goons laugh at him. At that moment he felt so beaten, helpless, and pathetic that he would have sold his soul (assuming he had one to sell) to Damaleous himself just to be free of his gag. Not so he could cast a spell on them but just so he could stand up and spit in Snaggletooth’s face.

Go to the hells you pig-faced son of a bitch. Angelika says I’m going to stomp around in your intestines and I’m going to enjoy it.

The orks went about setting up a camp for the night, or what must pass for a camp in orkish circles. They had no mules to carry their gear and, as a result, they had no items of luxury such as tents, bedrolls, or cookware. An ork camp consisted mainly of a hastily made campfire around which they huddled for warmth. Brisbane should have expected this from the orkish campsite they had stumbled onto during their journey up the Mystic, but he wasn’t exactly thinking clearly. The orks had left him where he had collapsed and they built their campfire a little way off to his left.

When they had their fire going well and the sky had darkened enough to be called night, Brisbane looked around him and saw Floppy producing and handing out thin strips of preserved meat from a pack he had been carrying. Brisbane’s stomach growled at him and, even though he knew he had little hope of getting anything, he got to his knees and crawled over to where the orks were reclining on the ground.

He was nearly on top of them before anyone noticed him. They all turned to look at him and he stopped where he was, putting his best look of vacuous hunger on his face. The orks turned to look at their leader and Snaggletooth addressed them in curt tones.

They’re not going to feed me! The thought flashed across Brisbane’s mind like a brushfire. They’re too scared of my magic to take off my gag. The only spell I know requires the use of my hands, too. Please, please, I won’t try to do anything.

One of the orks got up and started coming over to him. This one, at close to six feet, was at least two inches shorter than any of his companions. Half-Pint had a canteen of water in one hand and two strips of the preserved meat in the other. He knelt down before Brisbane and began to growl at him in his harsh-sounding tongue. He put the canteen down on the ground and the strips of meat down on top of it. He took a sharp knife out of his belt, one much like Snaggletooth’s, and pressed the tip of the blade against Brisbane’s throat.

The ork put his finger across his lips and said, “Shhh…”

Brisbane got the point. If he made one sound, Half-Pint was going to stab the knife into his neck. No noise, Half-Pint, you can trust me, nothing but chewing and swallowing. He slowly nodded his head.

Half-Pint reached behind Brisbane’s head and untied the gag. He took the securing strap off and Brisbane let the wadded-up rag fall out of his mouth. He stretched his jaws and they popped painfully. Half-Pint picked up one of the strips of meat and stuffed it into Brisbane’s mouth, the dagger still pressed against his throat. He began to chew. He did not know what kind of meat it was, but it was delicious. Whatever had been used to preserve it had dried it out a little, but he was in no position to complain. It was soon gone and Half-Pint stuffed the second one in.

Half-Pint held the canteen while he waited for Brisbane to swallow his second strip of meat. Brisbane quickly did and opened his mouth to show he was finished. Half-Pint held the canteen up to Brisbane’s lips and began to pour waves of crystal-clear water down his throat. Brisbane gurgled noisily as he swallowed as much as he could before Half-Pint took the canteen away and closed it up. When the ork did, Brisbane felt like a puppy deprived of its favorite treat. He looked pleadingly into the ork’s eyes, but Half-Pint only stuffed the rag back into his mouth and retied the gag, tighter than it had been before.

The meal had lasted no more than a minute and Brisbane had done just what he had been told. He wished he did know some ultra-powerful spell so he could speak just one word and have Snaggletooth and his goons burst into never-ending flames. He bet himself Roystnof would know some kind of spell like that and he would have used it as soon as that spit-soaked rag had fallen from his mouth.

Half-Pint pushed Brisbane around and got him to lay face down on the ground. He offered up no resistance even though he did not know what the ork was going to do. Half-Pint sat on his back and began to undo the bonds that had held his hands behind his back all day. He couldn’t see, but he knew Half-Pint had his sharp knife in his teeth, ready to plunge it into his back if he even flinched the wrong way.

Soon his hands were free and they dropped numb to his sides. Half-Pint began to massage them roughly and the blood started to run back into them. It hurt, but he decided the pain was better than no feeling at all. He still ached all over and the side of his face felt swollen and tender. He tried to rest it against the ground, but it was too painful and he had to lay his head down with his nose pointed the other way.

All too soon, Half-Pint began to retie his hands together behind his back. He tried not to whimper as his bonds were returned to him and the ork got off his back and went back to the campfire, his duties completed. Brisbane rolled over onto his side and watched the orks finish their meal, seeming to gorge themselves, and chat in their strange language. He was still hungry, but at least he was no longer starving, and he tried to keep his mind off his stomach.

For quite some time, Brisbane tried to make some kind of sense out of what the orks were saying to each other, but it was impossible and eventually he had to give it up. It was hard for him to make out individual words, he was unfamiliar with the syntax of the language and it was a chore just to figure out where one word ended and the next one started. He heard the groo-mack word several times, and he could only assume they were talking about him, but what they were saying and what it meant for his future were as unknowable as the secrets of creation.

Eventually, the orks began to get ready for a night’s rest and Brisbane had a glimmer of hope that perhaps they would sleep without guarding him and he could slip away into the night. But this was not to be the case, as he saw Half-Pint preparing a spot where he could sit up and watch him. He didn’t know how many watches the orks were going to set, but he realized that with five of them, they could set enough so no one would be in danger of falling asleep while on duty.

He stayed just where he was, lying on his side, and let his head rest in the dirt. He watched Snaggletooth settle down to sleep with Angelika laying length-wise by his side.

He cursed the ork. Four, they only have four available for guard duty because Snaggletooth is the leader now and leaders don’t stand watch. Leaders get to sleep the night through and wake bright-eyed and fresh in the morning. Just ask the ork laying at the bottom of the Mystic River what it’s like. He knows. He used to be a leader. Leaders are special people with powers above the regular man, aren’t they, Snaggletooth? You’re the leader now and you’ve got the power, but let me ask you something. Why can’t you pull that sword out of her scabbard? Big strong leader like you should be able to do that. Why can’t you pull Angelika out of her scabbard? I can.

He began to drift off to sleep despite the hardness of the ground and his uncomfortable position. He had been walked to exhaustion, and his body just shut down for a night of much needed rest.

Sometime during the night Brisbane had a dream. In it, he and Stargazer were in the clearing where they had met Ellahannah. But they were not petting the unicorn, they were making love underneath a soft shower of pink flower petals. Ellahannah was there, but she was not alone. Dozens of unicorns were there, all running in a mad circle around the lovers in the center of the clearing. Stargazer was on top of him and as she quickened her pace, taking more and more of him inside her, the unicorns began to run faster and faster in an ever-tightening circle. His head reeled with sexual ecstasy, his hands cupped around Stargazer’s buttocks and his eyes fixed on her full and swinging breasts, and just as his dream-body thundered in climax, he jerked himself awake and found himself staring into the eyes of his guard. The ork was smiling at him and Brisbane was sure he somehow knew what he had been dreaming about. He rolled over onto his other side, turning his back on the ork, and tried to go back to sleep.

Eventually, he did.

+ + +

This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (7)

2026-01-05T07:00:00.000-06:00

This is the seventh time I’ve read Moby-Dick.

This time I picked up an old paperback version from Everyman Press at Keynote Used Records & Books in South Lake Tahoe, California. I was there on vacation with my family and I remember my daughter asking me why I was going to read it for the seventh time and whether or not she should read it.

As to my reasons why, I told her about my frustrating experience with Nathaniel Philbrick’s Why Read Moby-Dick?, a slim little tome in which the author, I thought, entirely missed the point. To Philbrick, the reason we keep reading Moby-Dick is because it is a great adventure story, realistically told. He goes out of his way to declare that the White Whale is NOT a symbol for anything else.

As I said in my post on Why Read Moby-Dick?

The White Whale IS a symbol. In fact, it is baffling to me that Philbrick could possibly say that it is not. The fundamental reason we continue to read Moby-Dick is not because it is a good adventure story, realistically told. We read it because it is BOTH an adventure story, realistically told, AND it is a symbolic quest for an understanding of man’s place in the cosmos.

And…

It is the blending of the adventure story with the symbols that makes Moby-Dick worth reading. The whole book, from start to finish, is a master class in this technique -- using the characters and plot to advance not just a story, but an exploration of symbolic and existential meaning. There, in fact, may be no finer example of this in all of literature. THAT is why I keep reading Moby-Dick.

My brush with Philbrick clearly got my hackles up, and it whetted my appetite to again dive into a novel I had said last time I didn’t think I would ever take the time to read again. Perhaps, like Ishmael deciding to go to sea in the opening chapter, Moby-Dick is the tonic I best need to drive off the spleen and regulate the circulation.

And how satisfying was it to find the following excerpts in a section at the very end of my new used copy on the critical reception that Moby-Dick received at its time of publication?

Beneath the whole story, the subtle, imaginative reader may perhaps find a pregnant allegory, intended to illustrate the mystery of human life. Certain it is that the rapid, pointed hints which are often thrown out, with the keenness and velocity of a harpoon, penetrate deep into the heart of things, showing that the genius of the author for moral analysis is scarcely surpassed by his wizard power of description.

And…

But Moby-Dick, admirable as it is as a narrative of maritime adventure, is far more than that; it is, fundamentally, a parable of the mystery of evil and the accidental malice of the universe. The white whale stands for the brute energies of existence, blind, fatal, overpowering, while Ahab is the spirit of man, small and feeble, but purposive, that pits its puniness against this might, and its purpose against the blank senselessness of power.

Take that Philbrick!

As to whether or not my daughter should also read Moby-Dick, I told her, like I tell most people: life is far simpler if you don’t.

The Approach

But if I was going to dive beneath these waves again, I felt I needed a new kind of approach to the text -- something new to look for and think about. Otherwise, I knew I would find myself simply rushing forward to find my favorite excerpts. Thankfully, I found this new approach while reading the comprehensive introduction offered by Professor A. Robert Lee.

…Melville built Moby-Dick at a variety of interwoven and mutually reflective levels. Much as it tells of the gladiatorial combat of man against beast, or of a nineteenth-century American capitalist industry, his story also itself resembles ‘a Job’s whale’ whose inner meanings he took the most considerable pains to mask. To understand the enclosing design, the architecture of his ‘mighty theme,’ requires the reader’s patience and flexibility, no expectation of a single, mastering interpretation.

No single mastering interpretation. According to Lee, Melville reinforces this ‘mighty theme’ by constantly presenting facts and items in the story that are either open to multiple interpretations or which simply defy any kind of interpretation at all. Through this technique, the pre-ordained truth of Moby-Dick is as hidden from the reader as all the pre-ordained truths about whales and whaling are from the humble crew of the Pequod.

This, then, became my primary approach to this seventh reading of Moby-Dick.

A Sort of Indefinite, Half-Attained, Unimaginable Sublimity

And Lee is right. Once you start looking for them, these “items” with no fixed meaning or interpretation are everywhere.

But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through. -- It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale. -- It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements. -- It’s a blasted heath. -- It’s a Hyperborean winter scene. -- It’s the breaking up of the ice-bound stream of time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture’s midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? Even the great leviathan himself?

This is Chapter 3. Ishmael is looking at the painting above and behind the bar in The Spouter-Inn. And already Melville is giving you these hints to his mighty theme. What is this thing? What does it mean? The questions are not just for the painting, of course, but for the whale. And for the novel.

His Own Inexorable Self

In Chapter 9 Father Mapple preaches The Sermon, choosing as his text the story of Jonah and the whale. And as he concludes the lessons we shipmates are to derive from it, he says:

‘But oh! Shipmates! On the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low? Delight is to him -- a far, far upward, and inward delight -- who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world has gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight, -- top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to him, whom all the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath -- O Father! -- chiefly known to me by Thy rod -- mortal and immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world’s, or mine own. Yet this is nothing; I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?’

It is a bit of a muddled mess, but importantly it is an interpretation, a way of looking at the world around you. By my reading it is a bit of a blend, and perhaps a foreshadow of the coming clash between the Christian Starbuck and the Individualistic Ahab. Whether or not your feet are planted firmly on the Keel laid down by God, going forward into the world as your own inexorable self seems like the best way to delight and understanding.

Didn’t the People Laugh?

In Chapter 13, Ishmael struggles with a Wheelbarrow, and Queequeg tells a story.

Shifting the barrow from my hands to his, he told me a funny story about the first wheelbarrow he had ever seen. It was in Sag Harbor. The owners of his ship, it seems, had lent him one, in which to carry his heavy chest to his boarding house. Not to seem ignorant about the thing -- though in truth he was entirely so, concerning the precise way in which to manage the barrow -- Queequeg puts his chest upon it; lashes it fast; and then shoulders the barrow and marches up the wharf. ‘Why,’ said I, ‘Queequeg, you might have known better than that, one would think. Didn’t the people laugh?’

Upon this, he told me another story. The people of his island of Kokovoko, it seems, at their wedding feasts express the fragrant water of young cocoanuts into a large stained calabash like a punchbowl; and this punchbowl always forms the great central ornament on the braided mat where the feast is held. Now a certain grand merchant ship once touched at Kokovoko, and its commander -- from all accounts, a very stately punctilious gentleman, at least for a sea captain -- this commander was invited to the wedding feast of Queequeg’s sister, a pretty young princess just turned of ten. Well; when all the wedding guests were assembled at the bride’s bamboo cottage, this Captain marches in, and being assigned the post of honor, placed himself over against the punchbowl, and between the High Priest and his majesty the King, Queequeg’s father. Grace being said, -- for those people have their grace as well as we -- though Queequeg told me that unlike us, who at such times look downwards to our platters, they, on the contrary, copying the ducks, glance upwards to the great Giver of all feasts -- Grace, I say, being said, the High Priest opens the banquet by the immemorial ceremony of the island; that is, dipping his consecrated and consecrating fingers into the bowl before the blessed beverage circulates. Seeing himself placed next the Priest, and noting the ceremony, and thinking himself -- being Captain of a ship -- as having plain precedence over a mere island King, especially in the King’s own house -- the Captain coolly proceeds to wash his hands in the punch bowl; -- taking it I suppose for a huge finger-glass. ‘Now,’ said Queequeg, ‘what you tink now? -- Didn’t our people laugh?’

Melville is playing with meaning and custom here. The same thing -- wheelbarrows or punchbowls -- meaning different things in different contexts. Some frivolous and some serious.

Not Sick and Not Well

Quick one here. In Chapter 16, The Ship, Ishmael finds and is accepted as a member of the Pequod crew, but persists in asking about its infamous Captain.

‘And what dost thou want of Captain Ahab? It’s all right enough; thou art shipped.’

‘Yes, but I should like to see him.’

‘But I don’t think thou wilt be able to at present. I don’t know exactly what’s the matter with him; but he keeps close inside the house; a sort of sick, and yet he don’t look so. In fact, he ain’t sick; but no, he isn’t well either.’

Delicious. Ahab is not sick. But he is not well, either. What is he? How are we supposed to know?

The Transition

On this read through Moby-Dick, it became abundantly clear to me that Chapter 24, The Advocate, is where the transition happens. Chapters 1-23 are, more or less, an allegorized story, where the forward momentum is the story, accentuated with allegorical elements. But starting with Chapter 24, as the Pequod ventures out into the open sea, things switch from an allegorized story to a storied allegory, where the forward momentum in the allegory, accentuated with storied elements. In a way, these are dangerous waters, and it is where many readers find themselves lost, as everything one tries to cling to as slick with multiple allegorical meanings.

The Unreasoning Mask

Glad this one from Chapter 36, The Quarter-Deck, aligns with my theme, since it is one of my favorite passages in the entire novel.

‘All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event -- in the living act, the undoubted deed -- there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ‘tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.’

It is Ahab, talking to Starbuck, after Starbuck has chided him for seeking “vengeance on a dumb brute.” And here we can clearly see Ahab’s interpretation of the white whale as something much more, clearly separating the “unreasoning mask” that Starbuck sees from the “still reasoning thing” that exists behind it. Or does it? Even Ahab expresses some doubt in this passage, admitting that he is seeing through a glass darkly. But either way -- “be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal” -- Ahab will strike, strike out at what, as Father Mapple would say, his inexorable self sees and hates.

A Vacated Thing

Chapter 44, The Chart, follows Ahab down into his cabin after a squall, where he often sleeps the sleep of the tormented.

Often, when forced from his hammock, by exhausting and intolerably vivid dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts through the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies, and whirled them round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing of his life-spot became insufferable anguish; and when, as was sometimes the case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on fire. Yet these, perhaps, instead of being the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent weakness, or fright at his own resolve, were but the plainest tokens of its intensity. For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the white whale; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused him to burst from it in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living principle or soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was longer an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab’s case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own. Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the vert creature he creates.

This is a great example of a passage I’ve now clearly read seven times, but never before remarked or even paused to reflect on it. Like a lot of Melville’s prose, it is dense and hard to penetrate, but it seems to be describing Ahab as Ahab has just described the white whale, as a unreasoning mask -- a vacated thing -- behind which is a “living principle or soul” that animates him and drives him ruthlessly in his quest against the white whale.

Should I choose to read Moby-Dick for an eighth time, this may be an interesting approach to take to that reading. Where is Ahab agent and where is Ahab principal? It calls to mind the scene in The Symphony where Ahab reminisces about his youth and Starbuck sees through the pasteboard mask and is moved to deep emotion. But even on that scene -- is that Ahab agent or is that Ahab principal?

All Interweavingly Working Together

It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon; the seamen were lazily lounging about the decks, or vacantly gazing over into the lead-colored waters. Queequeg and I were mildly employed weaving what is called a sword-mat, for an additional lashing to our boat. So still all subdued and yet somehow preluding was all the scene, and such an incantation of reverie lurked in the air, that each silent sailor resolves into his own invisible self.

Chapter 47, The Mat-Maker, is a devilish chapter.

I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat. As I kept passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline between the long yarns of the warp, using my own hand for the shuttle, and as Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid his heavy oaken sword between the thread, and idly looking off upon the water, carelessly and unthinkingly drove home every yarn: I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as of this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads. Meanwhile, Queequeg’s impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be; and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding contrats in the final aspect of the completed fabric; this savage’s sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chance -- aye, chance, free will, and necessity -- no wise incompatible -- all interweavingly working together. The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course -- its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions modified by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at event.

Here are necessity, free will, and chance -- all working independently and in constrained concert with each other -- producing both actual fabric and the ultimate metaphor of existence. Or at least man’s view of it and his place within it.

And, then, the chapter shifts.

Thus we were weaving and weaving away when I started at a sound so strange, long drawn, and musically wild and unearthly, that the ball of free will dropped from my hand, and I stood gazing up at the clouds whence that voice dropped like a wing. High aloft in the cross-trees was that mad Gay-Header, Tashtego. His body was reaching eagerly forward, his hand stretched out like a wand, and at brief sudden intervals he continued his cries. To be sure the same sound was that very moment perhaps being heard all over the seas, from hundreds of whalemen’s look-outs perched as high in the air; but from few of those lungs could that accustomed old cry have derived such a marvellous cadence as from Tashtego the Indian’s.

As he stood hovering over you half suspended in the air, so wildly and eagerly peering towards the horizon, you would have thought him some prophet or seer beholding the shadows of Fate, and by those wild cries announcing their coming.

The shadows of Fate -- with wild cries announcing their coming.

‘There she blows! There! There! There! She blows! She blows!’

‘Where-away?’

‘On the lee-beam, about two miles off! A school of them!’

Instantly all was commotion.

The Sperm Whale blows as a clock ticks, with the same undeviating and reliable uniformity. And thereby whalemen distinguish this fish from other tribes of his genus.

‘There go flukes!’ was now the cry from Tashtego; and the whales disappeared.

‘Quick, steward!’ cried Ahab. ‘Time! Time!’

Dough-Boy hurried below, glanced at the watch, and reported the exact minute to Ahab.

The ship was now kept away from the wind, and she went gently rolling before it. Tashtego reporting that the whales had gone down heading to leeward, we confidently looked to see them again directly in advance of our bows. For that singular craft at times evinced by the Sperm Whale when, sounding with his head in one direction, he nevertheless, while concealed beneath the surface, mills round, and swiftly swims off in the opposite quarter -- this deceitfulness of his could not now be in action; for there was no reason to suppose that the fish seen by Tashtego had been in any way alarmed, or indeed knew at all of our vicinity. One of the men selected for shipkeepers -- that is, those not appointed to the boats, by this time relieved the Indian at the main-mast head. The sailors at the fore and mizzen had come down; the line tubs were fixed in their places; the cranes were thrust out; the mainyard was backed, and the three boats swung over the sea like three samphire baskets over high cliffs. Outside of the bulwarks their eager crews with one hand clung to the rail, while one foot was expectantly poised on the gunwale. So look the long line of man-of-war’s men about to throw themselves on board on enemy’s ship.

And here, the free will of the men advancing forward towards the Fate of their necessity, haunted by the chance movements of the whales unseen and beneath the sea. In this short chapter, Melville first weaves his metaphor of fate, chance, and free will, each working together to create reality, and then he shows the same action in the plot and action of the story.

Devilish.

Any Way You Look At It

In Chapter 55, Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales, Ishmael tries to give an accurate depiction of the whale as he is seen in the sea by whalemen; bemoaning so many of the inaccurate descriptions that populate our minds and documents. He concludes:

For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like. And the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.

The whale itself -- forever undescribed and open to interpretation.

Its Cunning Duplicate in Mind

In Chapter 70, The Sphynx, Ishmael (and Ahab) contemplate on the severed head of the Sperm Whale.

It was a black and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx’s in the desert. ‘Speak, thou vast and venerable head,’ muttered Ahab, ‘which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world’s foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor’s side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw’st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw’st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed -- while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! Thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!’

‘Sail ho!’ cried a triumphant voice from the main-mast-head.

‘Aye? Well, now, that’s cheering,’ cried Ahab, suddenly erecting himself, while whole thunder-clouds swept aside from his brow. ‘That lively cry upon this deadly calm might almost convert a better man. -- Where away?’

‘Three points on the starboard bow, sir, and bringing down her breeze to us!’

“Better and better, man. Would now St Paul would come along that way, and to my breezelessness bring his breeze! O Nature, and O soul of man! How far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! Not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.’

There are so many chapters like this in Moby-Dick. Melville famously dissects the whale in these chapters, looking at every piece and part of the whale -- and each of them, like its black and hooded head, is an allegory for the philosophical mind to cogitate on and interpret as it sees fit. Like the Sphynx, it will never reveal its own secrets.

Read It If You Can

Chapter 79, The Prairie, is another example, this time looking at the broad and featureless “forehead” of the Sperm Whale.

But in the great Sperm Whale, this high and mighty god-like dignity inherent in the brow is so immensely amplified, that gazing on it, in that full front view, you feel the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature. For you see no one point precisely; not one distinct feature is revealed; no nose, eyes, ears, or mouth; no face; he has none, proper; nothing but that one broad firmament of a forehead, pleated with riddles; dumbly lowering with the doom of boats, and ships, and men. Nor, in profile, does this wondrous brow diminish; though that way viewed, its grandeur does not domineer upon you so. In profile, you plainly perceive that horizontal, semi-crescentic depression in the forehead’s middle, which, in man, is Lavater’s mark of genius.

But how? Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written a book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in his doing nothing particular to prove it. Is it moreover declared in his pyramidical silence. And this reminds me that had the great Sperm Whale been known to the young Orient World, he would have been deified by their child-magian thoughts. They deified the crocodile of the Nile, because the crocodile is tongueless; and the Sperm Whale has no tongue, or at least it is so exceedingly small, as to be incapable of protrusion. If hereafter any highly cultured, poetical nation shall lure back to their birth-right, the merry May-day gods of old; and livingly enthrone them again in the now egotistical sky; in the now unhaunted hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove’s high seat, the great Sperm Whale shall lord it.

Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man’s and every being’s face. Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a passing fable. If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant’s face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can.

Read it if you can. It is unreadable, open to any interpretation that you might wish to give it -- or perhaps, in its expansiveness, imperious to interpretation entirely.

But An Empty Cipher

The gold doubloon that Ahab nails to the mast -- a reward to he who should first raise the White Whale -- is perhaps the clearest example of this narrative technique that allows for everything, literally everything, to be open to interpretation.

In Chapter 99, The Doubloon seems to beguile even Ahab, who looks at it in an attempt to decipher its true meaning.

But one morning, turning to pass the doubloon, he seemed to be newly attracted by the strange figures and inscriptions stamped on it, as though now for the first time beginning to interpret for himself in some monomaniac way whatever significance might lurk in them. And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the Milky Way.

For, of course, some certain significance lurks in all things -- but what is that significance, and can we ever know it for sure? One by one, Ahab, Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, each look upon the doubloon and interpret what its markings might mean -- for them if not for the world entire.

On its round border it bore the letters, REPÚBLICA DEL ECUADOR: QUITO. So this bright coin came from a country planted in the middle of the world, and beneath the great equator, and named after it; and it had been cast midway up the Andes, in the unwaning clime that knows no autumn. Zoned by those letters you saw the likeness of three Andes’ summits; from one a flame; a tower on another; on a third a crowing cock; while arching over all was a segment of the partitioned zodiac, the signs all marked with their usual cabalistics, and the keystone sun entering the equinoctial point in Libra.

In these figures Ahab sees the representation of his own quest against the White Whale, and the fortitude that one like himself must master if he is to be successful in that objective. But in them Starbuck sees the protection and benevolence of God, and Stubb sees all the things he can buy with the coin, and Flask sees nothing at all.

Which is the true interpretation? Is there one?

Some Invisible Power

And finally, with my approach to this seventh reading in mind, that Melville is purposely presenting character, plot and metaphor as things forever open to interpretation with no single meaning, it is, wonderfully, that iconic passage in Chapter 132, The Symphony, that now increases in its importance and indeliability.

‘What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all this time, lo! That smiling sky, and this unsounded sea!’

What is it, indeed? Melville is not going to tell you. You’ll have to come up with your own interpretation.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

A Holiday Break: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre by B. Traven

2025-12-29T07:00:00.044-06:00

Books are always the best holiday gift for me. The only thing I like better than the anticipation of reading a long sought after title is the fondness that comes with remembering the discovery of an unexpected treasure.

As I look back on all the books I've profiled here in 2025, the one I'd most like to revisit is The Treasure of the Sierra Madre by B. Traven, which I blogged about in February.

Here's how that post began:

The only thing I knew about this book was that I liked the movie that John Huston made out of it in 1948. The movie has a different feel than most of what comes out of Hollywood, then and now: grittier, and a little subversive. Humphrey Bogart plays a delightful Dobbs -- a man who is neither hero nor villain, someone worth rooting for and against, a man who gets both a raw deal and what’s coming to him.

Little did I realize how subversive the movie’s source material actually was. And the mystery surrounding it and the identity of its author -- B. Traven, evidently a pseudonym for an author who managed to remain hidden for his entire career and, seemingly, to this day.

The book, like the movie, is, at its core, a parable on the moral disintegration that accompanies greed. In its chosen idiom, the moral action of the narrative manifests in three people and their quest for gold in the mountains of the Sierra Madre.

It is, in my opinion, one of those rare books where plot and metaphor become one -- each serving the other in ways that are both recognizable and sublime. More than just greed, its parable on moral disintegration extends to market capitalism itself, and its final judgments indict more the system than the rugged individual.

Howard meditated for a while; then he said: “Come to think of it, you can’t blame him.”

“Meaning what?” Curtin asked, as though he had not heard right.

“Meaning that I think he’s not a real killer and robber, as killers go. It’s rather difficult to explain it to you, with the slugs in you. You see, I think at bottom he’s as honest as you and me. The mistake was that you two were left alone in the depths of the wilderness with almost fifty thousand clean cash between you two. That is a goddamned temptation, believe me, partner. Being day and night on lonely trails without ever meeting a human soul -- that gets on your mind, brother. That eats you up. I know it. Perhaps you felt it, too. Don’t deny it. You may have only forgotten how you felt at certain times. The wilderness, the desolate mountains, cry day and night in your ears: ‘We don’t talk. It will never come out. Do it. Do it right now. At that winding of the trail do it. Here’s the chance of your lifetime. Don’t miss it. You only have to grasp it and it is yours. No one will ever know. No one can ever find out. Take it, it’s yours for the taking. Don’t mind a life, the world is crowded with mugs like him.’ If you ask me, partner, I’d like to know the man on earth who could resist trying it without nearly going mad. If I were still young and I had been alone with you or with him, to tell you the truth, Curty, I might have been tempted too. And I wonder, if you search your mind very carefully, if you won’t find that you had similar ideas on this lonely march. That you didn’t act on them doesn’t mean that you felt no temptation. You may have got hold of yourself just before the most dangerous moment.”

“But he had no scruples, no conscience, I know. I knew it long before.”

“He had as much conscience as we would have had under similar circumstances. Where there is no prosecutor, there is no defendant. Don’t forget that. All we have to do now is to find that cheat and get our money.

Dobbs is not really to blame, for he is not the moral agent in this tragedy. He acts the way the system designed him to act; no more, no less.

As you enjoy your holiday break, I hope you find some time to curl up with a good book. I know I will.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

2025-12-22T07:00:00.000-06:00

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date.

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I’ve read some Hemingway before, but I don’t remember enjoying Hemingway as much as I enjoyed this one. Everyone talks about Hemingway’s terse prose style, but here it seems to be used to its best effect. Saying very little but saying volumes at the same time.

I turned her so I could see her face when I kissed her and I saw that her eyes were shut. I kissed both her shut eyes. I thought she was probably a little crazy. It was all right if she was. I did not care what I was getting into. This was better than going every evening to the house for officers where the girls climbed all over you and put your cap on backward as a sign of affection between their trips upstairs with brother officers. I knew I did not love Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her. This was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards. Like bridge you had to pretend you were playing for money or playing for some stakes. Nobody had mentioned what the stakes were. It was all right with me.

This was one of the first signals that I was on to something good here, coming very early in the novel when Frederic Henry first meets Catherine Barkley. They would become important to each other. I knew that, not just because it would be the kind of things that happens in books, but because Hemingway telegraphed it in a way that was clear but at the same time subtle. If I had read this book ten years ago, I don’t think I would have stopped on this paragraph. I would’ve sailed past it.

Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

It’s philosophical. It’s simple, but philosophical at the same time. And it’s powerful. Life, love, war and death -- it’s all powerful stuff, but told simply and with smooth and easy transitions from one scene to the next and pages of nothing but dialogue. Why do I have so much trouble getting from place to place and allowing my characters to talk to each other? Next time I am, maybe I should pull this one down and read a few pages?

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.