Uchtred
From EryriWiki
Character Name: Uchtred of Chester
Player Name: Matt M.
Game: Deva Victrix
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[edit] Character Description
A . . . stoop-shouldered? and rather . . . bestial . . . character who . . . talked like . . . this? It was very . . . important to him that his . . . snarl, clothing? be . . . statistically uniform. His addictive curiosity about . . . human ways got him . . . spikez0red in the last . . . session. Below is his . . . backstory!
[edit] Human life
Uchtred was born around 35 years ago to a Saxon family in Chester. He and his brother Aelred were brought up in the family trade—a shop, slightly upmarket in that it carried a lot of imported sundries—but Uchtred had struck out on his own by the time he came to manhood. He’d always been clever and interested in cleverness, and particularly interested in reading and writing; when he was ten his father consented, after much cajoling, to apprentice him to a scrivener. Nine years later, Uchtred had started his own scribing trade, first working at it part-time out of the shop and then making his own tiny office out of a loft upstairs.
More than nine-tenths of his work was utterly pedestrian—letters, contracts, accounts, the business of a port city. The remainder was why he’d pursued the scrivener’s trade: every now and then, he’d be asked to copy out a manuscript, or some portion of the Bible for a wealthy burgher. Occasionally he copied writing in tongues he knew scantly at best—Latin, German, French—and he’d entertain himself by puzzling and speculating as to the words’ meaning as he went. At a discount, he would occasionally offer to copy out writing in alphabets' he didn’t know (Greek, Hebrew), mostly for the pleasure of it.
A few years ago, Aelred took his wife Julian and his children northwest and built the first village shop in Redcliffe. Uchtred helped his brother as he could (all the new store’s goods had to be bought in Chester, of course), but he didn’t give much thought to moving himself. He traveled back and forth decently often, though, and saw how the town grew between each of his visits.
On one such stay, over a winter’s dinner he still remembers as warm and cheerful, lit by ruddy candles and Julian’s smile, Aelred proposed that Uchtred move to Redcliffe for good, and bring his trade with him. The little town and its port were growing, he said, and the flow of trade was strengthening to the point where a scribe might actually have something to do! As well, Aelred would be glad of his brother’s company and his learned wits—there was an oddness to Redcliffe, particularly at night, that Aelred didn’t know what to make of.
This was kind, Uchtred thought, and indeed flattering (particularly the not-especially-accurate part about “learned wits”). Uchtred’s brother was practical, down-to-earth, always determined to make ends meet; Uchtred had always wondered if he resented him for taking his own path in life—but this proposal of Aelred’s seemed like an admission (or just a reassurance) that he thought Uchtred was doing the right sort of thing with himself. He retired in a pleased haze of optimism and rose three hours before dawn to make his way home in the cold of January. He had things to do later in the day, and the road was beginning to be quite reliable, so he bundled himself up as best he could and set out without fear. He came to a now-familiar flat, bare place as he approached the River Dee. Snow-covered, it shone whitish gray in the foredawn light—like the smooth surface of the Moon, thought Uchtred.
[edit] Illness and escape
His next clear memory is of running down the road as the sun came up, in agony from a terrible bloody wound that showed his collarbone to the sky. Somehow, impossibly, he didn’t quite die as he staggered through the dawn into the city of Chester; somehow, weak and wondering why he hadn’t already collapsed, he made it to his office above the shop and fell down in the middle of the floor. His sisters hadn’t yet arrived to open the shop, and when they did come they didn’t hear him upstairs. He lay alone for hours, neither awake nor unconscious. Blood stained the floor, but it stopped coming—too soon, he thought, why so soon—and an hour after noon he sat up suddenly and found an expected client knocking at his door. Driven by some angry instinct he didn’t understand, he covered up his injury and threw a cloak over the stain on the floor, and let the man in.
But work was hard—so hard that he found himself trying again and again to write out the missive his customer dictated. At first he wasn’t satisfied with his letter-forms; then he stumbled over the spelling of “hundseofenteoða”; then he lost his temper with the whole matter and snarled at the man that, God wyst, if he was not out of Uchtred’s sight within one second—
That night, after he’d sat motionless and staring in his loft for hours, he stood up and realized that, apart from a livid scar that already looked weeks old, he felt well. Weak, like he’d been sick, but with a sense that he’d recover his strength with the right nourishment. He looked about him, at bits of words on paper, and found that he could no longer read; he stared at the ink and the pages for a long, long time. Then he went downstairs, said a terse, halting farewell to his sisters, and walked out of Chester. By the time he reached the forest, he had entirely forgotten how to speak.
[edit] Wolf-song
Like a woodwose, like Nebuchadnezzar, he lived mad, hairy, cold, and naked. He drank melted snow and ate roots, berries, bird’s eggs, three rabbits left behind by a terrified poacher . . . he nearly starved in that silence, the longest month of his life. Then the full moon rolled round again and he heard howling in the silver night, and found his own voice among the Singers. There’s no name for the pure song of werewolves: it has no words or language, and no one can use it to lie. Most of the time, it’s a song of delicious pleasure—though all hunters must live by their wits and marshal their energies very carefully, werewolves are the best, strongest, most graceful hunters, and they love the wide earth who has filled them with such power. Furthermore they have a sense of profound rightness about what they do: the final sprint and leap for the throat is like a sacrament to them. The earth has a way she wants things to be; a werewolf knows that way with a beast’s instinct and understands it with a human’s intellect.
The difference between this ideology and anything a human might endorse—from the werewolves’ point of view—is that it is not an invention. Humans use words and . . . ideas to pen up the concepts in their minds; a man is just as willing to create an entire imaginary armature of notions and names in his head, and call it a story, as to know and remember the truth of things. They know this and are not ashamed—they say their god brought the freshly devised beasts of the earth before First Man to see what he would name them! He himself he was no longer Uchtred—he no longer had any name.
The Singers left him to himself for the next year, though their songs taught him how to hunt and gave him the beginnings of understanding about the world at large.
[edit] Vampires
One evening, near the south road out of Chester, he was hunting a young woman. Her group of travelers had gone ahead, and were already within the gates, but she was half a mile behind them. He was in position to fall upon this straggler from her herd when a shadow leapt out from a hillock near the road and launched itself at the woman. It was another not-quite-wolf, but what smell it had was elusive and a bit stale. He knew that this must be a vampire—urbane parasites, he’d been warned about them—but he was impressed by its strength, and he sat on his haunches and waited while his competitor dragged the dying woman into the undergrowth.
There wasn’t any question of sharing the kill (indeed, he’d have found such an offer duplicitous in its submissiveness), and both parties kept a wary eye on one another. Once the blood had stopped flowing, however, the Gangrel sat back and spoke with him for a while in its curious version of the beast-tongue. It wasn’t a long conversation (after all, one of the two conversants was still hungry), but it was a surprisingly pleasant one. What was impressive was—what a human would call the Gangrel’s worst qualities. He had a hungry, short-tempered manner that he wasn’t embarrassed to show; he made no attempt to rationalize what business he was about. And he had a clear fear, nervousness, and distaste for the nearby town—something quite familiar to his werewolf interlocutor.
. . . Who, perhaps, came away from the meeting with a too-favorable impression of vampires. He met the Gangrel again a few times, but it was always a bit awkward: there wasn’t quite enough hunting-territory near Chester to go around, though unlike the vampire he was also willing to eat non-human animals. Instead, he decided one night, he’d swallow his unease and enter Chester itself—to kill among the pent-up human herd, he thought, though there was also a nameless curiosity in him.
Things did not go well. He had gotten into town silently enough, and was (not quite consciously) working his way toward the office of his human former self, when a loud group of vampires surrounded him. They weren’t anything like his friend: they had a chattering way about them, and though he didn’t understand their words the derision was plain enough. They were circling him while they were talking, trying to get behind him . . . he leapt at one and maimed him instantly, but then they were all on him. He was forced to run, as soon as he could, and he decided he’d better leave Chester behind for good.
[edit] Aelred
For no reason he could identify, he headed northwest, up the Wirral Peninsula along the Dee. He found himself a nice stretch of forest and marked it off as his hunting-ground. After a few days he realized that the road to Redcliffe ran along one side of this territory. (He wasn’t quite in the same spot he’d been bitten in, but he was a lot closer than he realized.) The Singers, by this point, had begun to tell him that his vampire trouble was far from unique—others of them had had trouble around Chester, and it was said that vampires were beginning to establish themselves in Redcliffe as well. Some of the Singers had killed the blood-drinkers, and some had been killed by organized parties. They asked him to watch the road when he could.
This he did, and to keep things private he refrained from killing the humans who passed by. It bored him, though, until one day a very familiar-smelling human appeared on the road. It was a man, somewhere between youth and middle age, dressed simply. The face was familiar, as well as the scent. It was . . . was he called “Uchtred,” a writer of words on paper? He followed, sticking to the trees, as the man went on his way toward Chester.
The next day the man went by again, going the other way. This time he followed.
[edit] Redcliffe
For two months he watched the man (who, fortunately, lived near the edge of town) as he went about his little life. He got very close; after a little while, he worked his way up to peering through the gaps in the walls at night. He concentrated, listened carefully. He moved his lips when Aelred (that was his name) spoke to his family. It was a silent obsession—he realized why when Aelred brought up his missing brother in a late-night conversation with his wife.
It didn’t feel like remembering, when he learned English. Rather it felt like learning it all again, and when he speaks now he tastes each word before saying it. The same goes for his former name and all the details of his life as a man. It all feels foreign to him—but he’s a rational person, and he knows that some of the details he’s aware of must have come from memory, rather than things Aelred told his wife.
He feels abundant disgust at what Redcliffe is becoming, and though he’s circled its edges a hundred times it’s not from any sense of belonging there. It’s more . . . voyeuristic. So much of what Uchtred found interesting or worthwhile seems absurd! Immoral, even. It puzzles his mind, looking in on his former life: what was the appeal of it?
This vice of his has caught the attention of the other Singers. It’s led them to ask him for a favor:
There is a human invention called “war.” The Singers fear that the vampires, in their craven adherence to their cattle’s ways, will remember this invention and make use of it, soon. There are too many different packs of them for comfort; worse, all those packs have a tendency to work together at times. They may decide, as humans would, that the Singers are their “enemies.” Accordingly, Uchtred has been asked to enter Redcliffe and speak to the vampires there—find their pack-leaders and see if things can be channeled onto the right path. It is fitting that there should be competition, after all. But if the blood-drinkers begin a pattern of rationalized killing, in search of some abstract humanlike objective such as “a safe place to live” or “the extinction of all werewolves,” the Singers will respond . . . and, if Uchtred’s experience is any indication, they’re more capable of humanlike folly than they realize. Hatred is reserved for the immediate moment—for something that is distasteful and unclean and in front of one’s nose. There should be no expansion of hatreds into the realm of words, ideas, constructs, broad classifications . . .
