The Fires of Orc
Chapter 18: The Fortress Soul

What would men be without women?

Scarce sir… mighty scarce.

Mark Twain

Danger abides in women not because they are reckless, but because they are so damnably cautious. A century-and-a-half rescued from their enkitchened status, they would still rather build a wall than knock one down. They are our mothers and daughters, our wives and sisters and they would give their lives for us. They would give their last breath for love, for peace, for the betterment of our world, but not for a moment of opportunity.

Risk is the one thing that gives a man meaning and the one thing a woman will avoid. The possibility of greatness is never as attractive to a woman as the certainty of security. She would take the actual over the possible any day, denying that of the two, the possible always outranks the actual. There is beauty in the world as a woman sees it – through the eyes of a mother, with true adoration for all things bright and beautiful, or those of a daughter, clear and bright, locked on travels yet to take. Best maybe through the eyes of a sister, seeing the calm world where the baser, violent things, the things of men, can replace no purchase. But what of the eyes of a partner, through which a man’s raving for what he should be doing is a terrible sight? Why will she not see that here and now are a moon-cast shadow compared to there and then? If only she would let slip his chains and send him forth to face the momentous challenge of the day!

Something there is in a woman that, however she may think, can still hold in fief the gathering storm and soothe the tortured soul and send the angel back into the scoundrel’s heart and with a laying on of her small hand quench in cool water man’s pain and unutterable wrath. Something there is in the world that needs the woman’s touch, something that needs its heart pierced by the angel, its soul soothed and its pain muted, but must they be only nurses, never generals?

What of the beastly things, the monstrous things, the ugly and devouring things? While women live in dreams of tranquil, fortressed life, who looks over the walls? Who watches that the demons do not swell their ranks and charge our shuttered portals? No shelter is safe without watchful eyes and arms to defend it. And although men will fight, who will watch? If not women, then who will send the flare into the sky to alert the soldiers to their real call and duty? Who will sound the bugle and urge forth the stalwart defenses to drive back real monstrosity when it shows itself? Who will send the runner to call the warriors from their drunken revelry and drive them out to meet the dust of thundering hooves beneath the war horses of true wickedness? While you contrive peace, dear mothers, wives, daughters, sisters, what keen eye will spot the threat on the horizon and pull us from our vice and shame, casting us as fiends and killer poets at the enemies of beauty?

For all its beauty, as women see it, the world is and has always been an awful place where cruelty abides and hope shrinks. Maybe it must be thus. But would that it were not! Would that cruelty could shrink and hope abide! Would that the sum of wars be forgotten and the warlike things of men put forever behind. Would that ours were a world where women watched that broad horizon and ordered us into battle in time to halt the diminution of our claim. We men, brave and eager, were ready once to live in such a world or die fighting for it. We were ready to heed the call and rail against what ravenous monster might show itself at the gate. We were ready to wield the brutal weapons cluttering the arsenal, to carry out what ghastly duty befell us in the service of hope and womanhood. But we never heard our orders from the soft lips that should have issued them. Our women would rather have us stay about the castle and let dragons have their way.

Women still would have us attend to the little things.

It’s always fetching this or reaching that. Or opening this and straightening that. It’s, “Honey, would you mind,” and “When you get a chance,” never “Save us from this dreadful peril.” We would build stairways to the stars, but they would have us move the book shelf. We would slay the Hydra, but they would have us take out the trash.

How small and feeble we must seem to the women who love us.

It’s a wonder they love us at all, fit as we are in their imagining for errands and chores and some mean feat of humble tool craft. Help with the baby, but don’t conquer the mountain. Bring in the mail, but don’t bring down a mammoth. Those things we were born to do frighten women in their fortress souls. Better to let mammoths run unhindered than charge one and risk being trampled. Better yet, stay indoors where mammoths can’t be seen.

In my time, as men grew soft, their hearts enfeebled by fear of their true calling, men’s duty receded. We slowed our step and moved back to walk with women at our sides, leaving no one at the lead. The custom long gone was to criticize women for being what men made them, a neat trick of misogyny. In my time, women spent so much effort becoming our equals they forgot they were our superiors. It’s easier, I’m sure, to throw off the shackles of oppression than to break the habits of the mind.

Or am I off-base. Is there not something kinder, gentler, some feminine impulse, some soft and sateen finish that lightly glides in smooth strokes over the roughened heart of man? Or are they really just like us? Are they men made in pixie size? Do they, like us, hate and burn and envy and plot and plan and yield to avarice? Are they just ourselves with better housing?

Of course they burn and yet they are not us.

Nature has made men equal, but not so equal that one might not better another through strength or guile. We must sort out among ourselves where each of us sits in his assigned station. There is neither logic nor emotion that can persuade men to flatten the pecking order according to which they identify themselves, always looking up at him above and pushing down on him below. In his lifelong climb a man would rather pull the ladder down sending himself with all his kind crashing to the cold ground in tangled death than to let himself be passed by a better climber.

A woman, however, is the full circle. Within her is the power to create, nurture, and transform. A woman knows that nothing can come to fruition without light. Why didn’t they command us when there was still a world worth saving? Where were women when we could still have stopped the fire? Perhaps they just wanted to watch us burn.

***

“What’s that Old Timer?”

“I beg your pardon, what?”

“You said something.”

“I did?”

“Yeah. I guess you were talking to yourself.”

I correct him, “I must have been thinking aloud.”

“Yeah,” he says, “by talking to yourself.”

“Have it your way,” I concede. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

“I just got back,” he says.

“How was your date? You weren’t gone very long.”

“It was nice. We just took a walk and talked for a little while. She had a lot of work earlier today so she was kind of tired.”

Teasing, I say, “It sounds to me like your gift didn’t work. I guess she’ll have to owe you.”

“You know, Old Timer,” he says, “for all your reading and refinement, you’re pretty crude. We went for a walk. We talked. People do that. It’s nice. Not everything is about who gets what out of who.”

“Whom,” I correct.

“Crude,” he says, shaking his head.

Veronica was an able stand-in by night but Lydia’s absence during the work day was unnerving. It felt wrong and I felt useless without her. The work had grown routine, mundane. There was little to do but stay on track and avoid any serious gaffs. There would be no new messages, no course changes, nothing drastic with three weeks to go. It was time to stay the course and trust where it was taking us. The work no longer meant anything. All that mattered was the outcome and I had a good enough feeling about that.

Even the outcome no longer mattered as much as it once did. The notion of hooking a win for a longshot had intrigued me. The craft and manipulation of getting him to the top kept me engaged. And then of course Lydia’s company made it all bearable past the point where engagement waned and so I’d made it to the end. Without her around, however, I had no real interest anymore. I could have stayed home. But then that would have been worse.

It’s never the case that the absence of one person is the sole source of loneliness for another. If one is lonely when alone it’s because one isn’t very good company. So certainly I wished she had been around, mostly because without her I had to be with myself. I had running dialogues in my head but they did little to hide the silence all around. Even in the crush of strangers ten deep at a bar I heard the echo of solitude. San Diego grew big and empty just as I drew near the end of an improbable journey.

It was worst in the early morning, the black-grey morning when I sat up alone and heard the city itself rumbling just outside my window. At four in the morning a man alone can hear the city growl. By light of day the city draws its breath past parted lips in deep gulps, fiery in the chest to fuel its waking heart. Then by night the breath grows deeper, cooler, slowed by liquor and the dark and the bygone work of day and coming of sleep’s short death and the city hums. But at four o’clock it growls. In its throat the city grumbles, hoarse and ragged, the unfed growl of a concrete lion – stretching, arching its creaking back in the wet air, licking the dew to stave off the night’s thirst. The city’s growl frightens the lonely heart.

Alone can be a welcome state but lonely is a terrible place wherever it may be.