Distance - The Background of Udhana

[Copper Dragon]

Common Knowledge

Known Name: Udhana

Otherwise: She-Orc, Bitch


Portrait

Appearance:
Height: slightly taller human height
Weight: compact
Eyes: yellow
Build: muscular, fit

Udhana stands taller than most women, but it's the width of her shoulders and hips that make her seem bigger, combined with her large hands and feet. Her build lacks the soft curves that a woman should have, instead showing lean, compact muscle.
Her features, while strong, rarely show emotion and when they do it seems more akin to a cool snarl. That gets further accentuated by the small tusks she sports - and the fact that she keeps her head clean-shaven leaves no friendly impression of her.

Her voice is rough, husky, but rarely used for conversation and even more seldomly raised. She speaks with a bland accent of the Moonsea region. Most often she spares others with glances of wariness, suspicion, or contempt.

Her equipment is a mishmash of useful steel, scavenged pieces or perhaps trophies, but their disorderliness aside they're meticulously cared-for. She is rarely seen without armour and besides the basic provisions of a traveller she carries around a great shield and a battleaxe. She smells faintly of oil and smoke.

Most Seen:
While the orcblood's appearance isn't nondescript, many decide to rather ignore her than acknowledge her presence. As such people wouldn't immediately be able to tell you if they'd seen her - but general consensus suggests she'd been seen frequenting The Belle's Bottom in Sarshel a while ago. Whether that's a year back or just a few months is unclear. If not in the port city then she can be tracked down to Outentown and its surrounds, offering her steel for coin.

Rumours:
There aren't many rumours surrounding the woman-thing. There's little more to hear, beyond the speculation that Impilturans might reserve for orcbloods.



As for where she started...

[Copper Dragon]

Around the Year of Moonfall, 1344 DR...

Winter had lasted well over four months, but thaw and a bleak summer weren't far off, now. In the mountains of northern Impiltur – a no man's land between the Easting and Damara – lay a nameless village, a collection of eight houses. Fifteen miles down was Borgar's Mill, ten miles down was a farmstead or two, but both of these could have been a hundred miles away for all one could care: the winter snows were thick and impenetrable.

No supplies would reach villages such as this one during the white season but that was known and accepted – and prepared for. The pantries and basements had been stocked up well and there was enough left to hold out; smoked meats and fish, onions, apples, pears, earth-apples, cabbage, carrots and beats... The supplies would hold. This, the orcs hoped for also.

The village was attacked by nightfall. In the howling bone-chilling wind their arrival was neither heard nor seen; and they approached eagerly, hungry and restless from a winter taxing their storages. As Undor, the previous chief's third brother, snuck through the high snow, he could almost taste their prize; the food and the thralls they'd take.

It was over all too quickly. The raid was more akin to a father slapping an infant – a victory that was almost humiliating to the victor, it was so easy. Undor killed a few and ravaged two of the pink-skinned women, but even that was dull; one of them didn't even scream, maybe half-dead from sickness. Only after he finished with that one did he conclude she may have been ill, and did he wonder if her weak human disease would be contagious, so he left the ragdoll of a female behind to freeze in her hut. No slave nor meat, that one.

Ilona, the ill woman, was left alive, but that seemed a worse fate there and then than the nothingness of death. She had broken some small bones, felt the bruises ache, breathed with a sick, hollow peep from her throat. Her cousin, the lass who had been raped by three of the orcs, had been dragged away and out, and the small house had been turned upside down with pots broken, baskets ransacked and bags taken away. The other thatched houses got plundered too, then a few set on fire, by accident or design.

She managed to crawl out of her home, smoke, haze, and biting winds confusing her senses; but no orc blade came to end her. Undor and his fellows – and her village and villagefolk – were gone.

[Copper Dragon]

Ilona survived the attack and braved the snows trying to head for Borgar's Mill. Fifteen miles through snow, cold and the bold hills leading down to Mill were enervating, and she didn't make it. Not that far. She did make it to one of the houses along the way – an abandoned cabin in which she spent out the snowstorm. Ilona slept long into the day after the skirmish; a deep sleep that she had to force herself out of and continue, lest she may have slept into eternity. Once she left the hunter's cabin, the nearest farmstead was not far off. By midnight she knocked on the door and was taken in...

In the coming months Ilona drifted from farm to village to farm. She never settled in Borgar's Mill down by the Great Impharas River; she could have, and with her frost-bitten left foot she might have done well to settle down. But she used to be a grasswoman and midwife, and once she could, continued her work as such. A herbalist's trade sent her from community to community, family to family.

Winter came once again, in lazy layers, and by the early arrival of the cold season Ilona had moved in with the Orlawsksyns. They lived in the foothills, northwest of Mill on a decent-sized farm. Upon her arrival Ilona had saved the life of their youngest, a babe of three weeks, with her grasses and spices, and it became clear she had work with the boy well after healing him of the worst. She would continue to give him herbs mixed in donkey milk for his enduring feverish condition. With the weather so cold out, the boy's need for a caretaker, and her own belly heavy with child, Ilona was welcome with the Orlawsksyns to stay the winter, and she accepted gladly.

Wise that she did; the grasswoman went into labour a short time later. Ilona's birth-giving was an easy one, relatively short for her first labour – four hours – and so it could have been called blessed, were it not for the wrinkled grey-tinted infant that had been pulled out of her womb. The Orlawsksyns were mortified, but Ilona demanded her gods-given rights: claimed rightly that she and her babe were under protection of the law of salt and bread, as such couldn't be thrown out without offending the gods; and the right that she had earned through the guarding of Orlawsksyn Marieka's boy's life, so now the same must be done for her suckling.

Ilona died a month later in the heart of winter, but the Orlawsksyns kept their word. They kept the babe and waited three months, as customary, before giving it, her, a name: Udhana, after the woodswitch who was said to live in these mountains, who could speak with bears and wear their skin while they were still alive. They didn't choose this name because they saw in Udhana's future a fierce warrior like a bear or a wise woodswoman-to-be. Indeed, quietly they hoped she would perish long before her future became clear. But with the name of a fearsome witch, the child wouldn't attract evil spirits to the Orlawsksyn household, and thus wouldn't bring bad luck upon their doorstep. How much bad luck the Orlawsksyns and Udhana brought upon each other was another matter.

[Copper Dragon]

The Orlawsksyns counted eight among their number at the time that Ilona had arrived. Laszlow was the head of the household, Marieka his wife and the mother of his children – five children including the suckling that Ilona had saved, and to whom Udhana, in a sense, owed her own life. Besides father, mother and little ones, Marieka's mother and Laszlow's cousin lived on the farmstead too; many working hands, many mouths to feed. A half-monster's mouth wasn't a welcome addition, but a few of the household were convinced she wouldn't be a burden long.

They were proven wrong, for Udhana didn't die in the crib. She didn't die in her bed either, or wouldn't have if she'd had one. She didn't get a bed of her own – all the children slept together in a broad, low bed with furs, but it wasn't even there that she slept; Marieka wouldn't have it that the witchname would lie with her little ones. So, as soon as Udhana grew too large for a crib and for nursing, she slept on a haystack or in a corner. At least she wasn't set outside to sleep like a dog. And she better be thankful for that, Marieka reminded her oft.

Marieka was a deeply religious Impilturan woman: she revered the Triad, primarily Ilmater, and prayed to them every morning and evening with zeal. She made her children do the same as soon as they could speak so even if they were taken before their time, they wouldn't end up on the grim Wall of the Faithless. She gave them names that pleased the Gods Three, also – there was Sollar the eldest, named after the Twice-Martyred Saint; there was Tyrina, named after the Just God; Ilmur was named after the Broken God; Ljev, in honour of the True's symbol, the lion; all her treasures belonged to the Triad, except for the smallest, the saved boy, who instead got the name Ilonur after the herbalist that had saved him: so that her spirit would be obliged to watch over him even after her death. That had been advised by Marieka's mother, a hag of a woman that lived with the Orlawsksyns and who had also advised to name the orc after the woodswitch.

By contrast Laszlow, the head of the farm and family was an earthly man; a footsoldier who had left his homeland Damara behind for the quiet and peace of Impiltur's backcountry. He enjoyed working on the farm more than he ever enjoyed the militant life he'd abandoned. But he never shook the nightmares he had been given as a bitter present of that time – nightmares that made him twist and turn in bed and sometimes cry out in the night. His children and Udhana were used to his shouts, outbursts and whimpers from early on. As early as any of them could remember, Laszlow was haunted by Damara at night, even if in daytime he was glad to be away from it.

On a farm everyone had their task, everyone their duty: “No work, no bread” as the saying went. Men and women toiled separately, and the tiny orcish rag spent her earliest years among the wives' skirts. A rag she was called, hanging there from their dresses, useful for nothing but filth. Women from several farms often gathered and shared tales and wisdoms while they worked, and Marieka was the wisest and loudest of them all. She was righteous and faithful, too, and often she'd speak of the Gods Three or Ilmater, and how she knew as sure as day who deserved their mercy and who was doomed. Udhana was one of the latter, for orcs never earned kindness from gods and shouldn't from men. It, she, was too stupid and crude besides to stay with the women during the day, the housewife argued. When she'd grow a little more, Marieka wisely insisted she be given to the men to deal with – let her clean the stalls and outhouse and gather mushrooms in dung.

If the daughter of Ilona had no friends nor love among the women, the boys – Sollar, Ilmur, Ljev, and the neighbour lads Simorus, Andrik and Tog – had even less to spare. Except for one...