On Tagga
Introduction
During the Spring Equinox, Jared of the Suns of Couros announced their intention that we investigate “the life and virtue of Jaggah, Thrace's mother”. According to the Lepidean Librarian, she was “instrumental in sending dreams of rebellion to the orc slaves of the Empire in preparing them for the fires of Thrace's ambition.”
The results of our research make grim reading. It is an unpalatable reminder that we, the Empire, kept these people enslaved and allowed them to be treated like objects or cattle. While this document speaks of Varushka we must not forget that Highguard's hands are not clean here. Even among the Freeborn, who take great pride in as a nation objecting to slavery, there were plenty of people who simply did not care about the orcs and their treatment. None of us are innocent in this, and we should not forget that it has been only a little more than six decades since the idea of an orc being allowed into the Senate building as anything other than a cleaner who could be beaten for spending too much time looking at the Throne, or the hangings there, was inconceivable.
So I hope you will forgive us that in some places we elide or gloss over deeply upsetting details.
The Challenge of Orcs
As part of our research we have encountered some significant obstacles. We have done our best to overcome them but in some cases they have proved all but insurmountable.
First, there are simply no written records of the forebears of the Imperial Orcs, not in any way that we can usefully access. The orcs were not permitted literacy, and while some of them certainly could write their texts were fragile and all too often lost with their writers. Those few that survive are treated with great respect and their owners have refused to allow us access to them. Most of what we have learned has come from speaking to some of the surviving orcs who knew Thrace personally, and there are increasingly few of them as time slowly grinds them away. Other than that we have studied accounts of the rebellion, and of the years immediately following it, but Thrace's mother is simply... absent.
We do know that the name of the orc woman considered to be Thrace's mother was not “Jaggah” but “Tagga”. The two sound very similar, so it's conceivable this is just a simple misunderstanding. Both are common-enough orc names.
Finally, Tagga herself is not the subject of a past life vision. Neither is she a paragon, nor an exemplar, nor are we aware of any indication that she might become one. She appears to exist purely as a character in the story of another person, in this case Thrace the Rebel, exemplar of Ambition. The Lepidean Library, and the Heirs of Lepidus, exist to learn more about paragons and exemplars, and provide supporting evidence where it can be gathered to add context to true liao visions of past lives. This investigation pushes the boundaries of our remit, and might perhaps have been a better choice for the Minister than for the Library. We have done the best we can.
Who Was Tagga?
It's not clear whether Tagga was actually Thrace's mother or not. Some of the orcs who knew Thrace say that he spoke of Tagga as being his mother, and as having “many children, like every orc mother in the slave camps of Varushka.” It was quite rare for orcs to spend too much time in the company of those they had blood-ties with. An orc parent was given little freedom to raise their own child, the responsibility often falling to older orcs whose comparatively lighter duties. Slave owners had little concern for family ties; it was common to sell orc youths between owners, to prevent them forming bonds of family that might have given them the will to rebel.
She is described as having a will of stone, like a mountain, but also the wisdom to know when to hold her tongue and cast her eyes down. A strong will was often seen as a curse by some of the orc slaves, and indication that the one who possessed it would invariably attract the attention of an overseer and be punished. According to Thrace's contemporaries she was regularly sold onto new owners, when her presence was judged disruptive. This makes it even less likely that she was actually Thrace's mother in the literal sense.
There are a few stories that tell us that Tagga herself was something of a revolutionary, reinforcing the idea that when Thrace called her his mother he was speaking metaphorically or symbolically. It is apparently from her that Thrace absorbed the idea that before the orcs could come together to effectively fight their Varushkan oppressors they needed to stop seeing themselves as belonging to separate septs, but as a single great family. Where Thrace went even further was in realising that every orc in the Empire was part of his family, and they were united by their ultimately unjust treatment at the hands of Imperial citizens.
Dream Sender
Along with her vision of the orcs as one people, Tagga offered a second gift to her son. Here the facts become less coherent, but the stories agree on several points. Firstly, Tagga was a magician. She hid her talents, and was untrained, but had a natural ability to weave mana. She claimed she heard the voice of an ancestor who taught her how to heal the wounds of her fellows with songs.
The rebellion began at the Krahsniy Moy mines in Crowslook, Karsk. The owner of the mine was Kranislav Beorg Nevraski. Nevraski was a member of a wealthy cabal of mine owners, who between 315YE and 317YE held the Eternal Shafts of Time Bourse seat which served only to increase his personal wealth. They died along with most of their family in the first days – hours – of the rebellion.
Kranislav was a magician, and after his death his store of crystal mana came into the possession of Tagga. She apparently gathered a couple of other orcs who had a similar capacity to perform magic together, and performed a ritual. Where the ritual came from, and what it did, none of the orcs we spoke to could be certain but according to one venerable survivor of the revolution, Steelbrow Karrat, she spoke of sending out “little birds, bearing the sparks of fury.”
Death
Tagga died in Spring 323YE. During a retreat from an engagement with a contingent of the army of the Golden Axe near Korotny. She was struck by an arrow, and unfortunately it was impossible to recover her or her body. She was presumably burned alongside the other orcs who fell during the encounter.
Virtue
It is not for us to judge if Tagga was virtuous. While some of the orcs may have known of the virtues, there is no indication that they felt the Way had any relevance to their lives of constant toil.
What little information we have is that Tagga appears to have evidenced Wisdom, in that she perceived that the orcs would need to be united if they were to win their Freedom. She was Ambitious, in that she wanted all orcs enslaved not only in Varushka but elsewhere to be freed from slavery. She was Proud, in that she strove to inspire others and strove for excellence. And like her son, she also evidenced qualities associated with Anarchy, in that she wanted orcs to throw off the yoke of the Varushkans, in defiance of Imperial law, and carve out a life for themselves without reference to the Empire.