I wasn’t going to post this here, but I rather liked how it turned out. It’s a short standalone story from my upcoming Dwarf / Dark Lord novel.
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The tea flowed with beautifully, in an arc which was simultaneously as elegant a kitchen technique as Sam had ever seen, and a move of humility as she tilted her head to one side and quirked her eyebrows, her thoughts clearly on nothing else in this World except the utterly, earth-shakingly important task of making sure Sam was not low on tea.
It was not what Sam had expected when the Head Ogress accepted his petition to enter her swamp. Nor had he expected the language.
Outside of the cottage, she had greated him with “Me Sagira. You Sam. In.”
Ergo, this simple-but-elegant teatime, and the accompanying conversation, were quite unexpected by Sam.
“What a welcome surprise!” she said to him, taking his coat deftly and hanging it on a marvelously intricate carving which served as a hook on the wall by the door. “We have been hoping you would grace us with the joy of a visit. And I am also told you bear tidings most welcome; but we should get to business after something to warm you. Might you have the kindness to join an old Ogress in a cup of tea?”
Sam had learned, early on, that an important part of an Ambassador was pretending not to be surprised.
“What the hell?” he said, standing there and staring.
Sam was, as he often noted in his notebook, a terrible Ambassador.
But one learns by mistakes. Fail, then fail faster, then fail better; so said the Dwarf philosopher Simon. And those of his school, which Sam was, tried to avoid the trap of believing they ought to be perfect.
Still. Sam was a terrible Ambassador. And perhaps foolish; he should’ve expected a club to the head for that, or, indeed, for just about anything. Ogres were well-known to be angry, stupid, angry about being stupid, stupidly angry, large, powerful, angry, solitary, angry, stupid, and also, violent. Very, very, very, very violent. They spoke in the monosyllables which had greeted Sam as he’d begun to meet them in the city by the Swamp. They did seem surprisingly canny with money, and the tavern-keepers seemed to have no fear that they’d get violent enough to prohibit them from getting smashed in their establishments. Sam figured that, for some reason, all of the Ogres of this region must be somber drunks.
(Poor Ogres.)
So the entire experience was surreal for Sam.
It would also have been unpleasant, had Sam been slightly less pragmatic. He was either being insulted on a deep level in a manner which would make it almost impossible to tell if the other was taking him for a fool, or simply being told something insulting in a matter-of-fact way made as sweet as possible by the aforementioned tea; also scones with pomegranate jam, fiery cinnamon petits-fours, hand-milked gryphon butter (don’t ask), and a side of what Sam realized was brandy soon after she’d poured a generous tot into both teacups and he caught a quick whiff.
“Of course we’ll be glad to send you our idiots,” she said, “but what do YOU get out of it?”
Sam sighed.
“Honestly, nothing,” he said. “I have a generous pay allowance, but my mission is ‘to do my job the best I can’. Right now, recruiting Ambassadors is complicated, but at least it generally reduces to a binary: either I end up with a new Ambassador, or I do not.”
“Oh, no, no,” she said. “We REFUSE to send you an Ambassador.”
Sam blinked, but said nothing. She’d had enough satisfaction so far; he could tell she wanted him to feed her a straight line, and he wanted nothing of it. He waved his hand wearily. She smiled as though she didn’t see his hand.
“We have FAR too many idiots. We’re going to send you an Embassy.”
Sam couldn’t blink again without over-watering his eyes. He did anyway, and spend the next minute blinking out the tears from over-blinking, which encapsulated his life metaphorically so aptly that he decided not to think about it further and turned back to what she was saying.
“…but of course, the good life isn’t for everyone,” she said.
“I’d agree,” said Sam. A serving maid appeared and made the current teakettle vanish, replaced swiftly and with a practiced hand by a fuller, pot of tea to replenish what they’d lost. She also placed apair of little vermillion custards on the table; Sam couldn’t identify the flavor, but after his first nibble, he’d consumed an entire custard in a bite and was waiting, in a manner not without a certain impatience of hope, to see if she was going to consume the other or might leave it long enough that he might consume the other.
“…no, they’d like to flaunt the intellect and sophistication of the Ogre species throughout the World. Live it up. Let everyone else see how extraordinary we are; let them envy us.”
“And you don’t want that?” Sam asked, eying a cupcake whose icing looked as though it had about the same temperature and consistency as snow, but which was evidently a form of powdered sugar.
“Gods, no,” she replied. “It leads to all kinds of trouble.”
“So you only live like this in private?”
“Our public image is, er, how shall I put this? …it is a certain representative but convenient subset of our people. Some of our people enjoy pretending it’s the good old days, the ancient times, when life was simple and one didn’t have to worry about the stock market.”
“You mean cattle?” asked Sam.
“Nevermind,” she replied, pouring what might have been their fourth cup of tea-and-brandy. The dessert was largely demolished. “They enjoy pretending that they live in the simpler, bygone days of a thousand years ago, before we had technology and day jobs.”
“What’s a ‘day job’, asked Sam, who was born underground and first saw the Sun when he was 7.
“Nevermind,” she replied. “At any rate, most Ogres…prefer the company of our own kind. For a variety of reasons. The ones who mix with others are quite convenient for us. As long as you think we’re quaint and simple-minded, all you’ll do is use us for the occasional Great Battle between Good and Evil, which is always fun; we’ve had some bottles of champagne waiting on the next one, let me tell you. Our compliments to your Dark Lord, by the way.”
“She hates compliments,” muttered Sam. The Ogress continued:
“The rest of us realize that our lives here are wonderful, and we wouldn’t trade them for anything. But you always get a few young idiots who think they should go out and change the World. Change it HOW? It’s already an excellent World in which to be an Ogre.”
“And you’re…”
“…sending all of them to you. Yes. With much pleasure.”
Sam nodded.
“I can’t tell if you’re insulting me or not,” he said.
“I’m not sure myself,” she said. “One never is, when dealing with the lower species.”
She pushed the remaining custard towards him. “Another?” she asked.
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