Your Honor, My Client is Not Guilty: Examining the Moral Status of the Worms

The fantasy genre frequently includes literal monsters of various kinds as villains for the hero to overcome. Sometimes, however, the biological monsters are not evil beings but are neutral characters or even allies. Sometimes the real monsters are humans. In P. Djèlí Clark’s short story “The Paladin of Golota,” large worms are the primary antagonist, yet the Pickers, including Teffe, and the worms share many similarities. Despite their negative portrayal and presence as antagonists, the worms in “The Paladin of Golota” are not evil- or are at least no more evil than the human Pickers.

One of the ways the worms are described negatively is through their appearance, but appearance isn’t everything. They are described in ways that border on the horror genre: their mouths are described as “hideous things, extending as the skin on their heads peeled back to reveal a long, pink and fleshy tube” (Clark 13). From the human point of view, seeing anything peel back the skin on its head would be grotesque even before seeing the mouth inside. The worms also have outer flesh so pale that “the faint outlines of pulsing organs could be seen beneath,” which has the potential to be very disgusting, and the giant worm has fleshy “tendrils” (Clark 13, 16). The worms’ semblance is so off putting that Teffe- a battlefield scavenger who has undoubtedly seen his fair share of disgusting sights- is unable to control himself and vomits (Clark 13). Zahrea, who has seen many battles first-hand, says that she has seen great warriors “lose their bellies before a fight,” and of those warriors “none faced this” (Clark 13). Zahrea’s statement implies that the worms are more ugly than she has seen in her long career.
The worms’ disgusting appearance, however, does not make them inherently evil. From the perspective of the worms, humans must look very strange. A human is a gangly creature with four strange appendages, a strangely small mouth with teeth in it, and a completely unnatural movement style using the two lower appendages. Further, if strangeness indicates evil, then the supposedly good goddess Umani is even more evil than the worms. Umani is described as having a “serpentine body, greater than any worm, so vast it seemed to take up the whole plain” (Clark 19). Both the worms and Umani have the same basic shape, but Umani appears to be both even larger and even more strange, having arms “ending in fingers like tendrils” (Clark 19). Worse yet, Umani has no visible head, just “thick tentacles that writhed about. From beneath them sat eyes in their scores or perhaps hundreds” (Clark 19). Umani’s form seems completely bizarre and even eldritch, but Zahrea believes she is a force for good. Because Umani and the worms look physically similar, calling the worms evil based on sight alone would also condemn Umani.

Teffe’s inability to visually distinguish between worm and goddess also means his slander of the giant worm as evil is ill-founded. When the giant worm emerges from the ground and “shrieks,” Teffe thinks the giant worm is “no simple beast” but instead “a demon, some horrid thing crawled up from the Under Realms” (Clark 16). Intelligence and the ability to make noises do not make something evil, so once again Teffe must be basing his opinion of the worm’s moral status largely on its physical appearance. In addition, Teffe’s assumption that the worm is a monster is complicated by his inability to identify the goddess Umani. When Umani arrives on the battlefield Teffe thinks she is “a monster…. [s]ome new demon crawled up from the Under Realms” (Clark 19). Clark uses the exact same words to describe the worm and Umani: “demon” and something that has “crawled up from the Under Realms” (Clark 16, 19). If it is so difficult to tell the difference between an “evil” worm and “good” goddess, then Teffe’s assumption that the large worm is a demon carries no weight. After Zahrea returns, hovering in the air, Teffe realizes that “[h]e had borne witness to the passing of a god, and not recognized it,” but this lack of recognition could be applied to another entity: the giant worm (Clark 20). Teffe assumed that the worm was a demon, but it’s entirely possible that it was the manifestation of another god. Since Teffe was wrong about Umani, he may very well have been wrong about the worm as well.

The worms’ behavior also does not seem to indicate that they are any worse than the Pickers. The worms are described as creatures that “devour anything on the battlefield—living or dead, flesh and bone, even steel,” which at first makes the worms seem like heartless monsters (Clark 6). However, the Pickers are no better. The Pickers are battlefield scavengers who steal from the dying and the dead, and even Teffe views the battlefield as a “fresh harvest of the dead and dying” (Clark 3). Instead of seeing the dead as people to be respected, the Pickers see the dead as a resource to be collected and used for personal gain. The lack of respect is obvious when Teffe tells Zahrea that he will not only take a “gold collar from [her] neck and that dagger with the ruby hilt in [her] waist sash” but also “pull out [her] teeth [and] cut [her] hair” - she is clearly no more than “a claim,” a resource, to Teffe (Clark 3). Both the worms and the Pickers treat the warriors irreverently.

The worms and the Pickers also seem to have similar motivations. The Pickers are poor and need to loot the dead to buy food to survive. The smaller worms don’t appear to have higher intelligence and are likely motivated by food, searching the battlefield with “hungry mouth[s]” (Clark 14). It is difficult to denounce the worms for trying to get food to survive without also denouncing the Pickers for their attempts to survive. Nor do the Pickers have a better claim to the battlefield remains than the worms: the Pickers live in the nearby town of Am Amara and the worms live right underneath the battlefield (Clark 3, 6). Some townspeople theorize that the worms are “called… by the screams of the dying,” or perhaps the worms had “always slept beneath the earth and were awakened as blood watered the soil” (Clark 6). If either of those theories are true, then it is the fault of the humans for disturbing the peacefully resting worms in the first place. The worms’ domination of the battlefield during the night is also not evil- real life wild animals like bears aren’t described as evil for defending their territory from intruders, so neither should the worms. Further, if protecting territory is inherently wrong then the Pickers are equally bad: Teffe’s fight with Chip Tooth shows just how ready the humans are to protect their claims (Clark 1-2).

In one way, however, the Pickers are worse than the worms: cruelty. When worms eat the living and dead there is no obvious malice, but the Pickers are not always so indifferent to the suffering of their victims. Teffe thinks about how “Chip Tooth and his gang would have bashed [Zahrea’s] mouth in with a hammer to get at the gems in her teeth" without being “bothered to cut her throat first,” meaning Zahrea would be alive to feel all of that pain (Clark 2). The idea that Chip Tooth can’t be “bothered” to kill Zahrea first shows a complete lack of compassion: the average dying warrior can’t put up much of a defense, so choosing not to kill the warrior first shows a total lack of mercy and empathy. This mindset is not unique to Chip Tooth and his gang as “crueler sorts [of Pickers] now delighted in tormenting the dying, perhaps more than they did scavenging” (Clark 2). The Pickers who intentionally inflict pain on the injured and dying are torturing people who are in many cases practically defenseless. This is more cruel- more evil- than worms who simply kill.

It is true that the worms act as the primary antagonists in the story, but that doesn’t make them evil. Zahrea’s fight against the large worm allows her to die with glory and be carried away by her goddess Umani (Clark 19). Her victory and ascension in turn inspire Teffe that heroes do exist. Without the worms, there would be no real antagonist and as a result no real story. However, looking at a story from a different perspective can change who the antagonist seems to be. As Zahrea sings a hymn and Teffe kills the worms, he can “feel a power flow into him, guiding his hand and filling him with a euphoria beyond simple quaj” (Clark 15). This battle craze- stronger even than the drug quaj- raises questions about the morality of Teffe’s actions. Teffe is “caught up in the frenzy” of killing the worms and hears “satisfying shrieks of the dying,” meaning he is enjoying slaughtering the worms (Clark 15). Even if Umani were good and the worms were evil, taking this much delight in murder seems problematic. From another perspective, the goddess Umani is manipulating Teffe into massacring living beings, and neither manipulation nor massacre are typical attributes of moral goodness.

There is no logical reason to believe that the worms are evil. The worms’ physical appearance does not make them evil, and criticizing their behaviors would require criticizing the Pickers’ similar behavior or risk falling into speciesism. In fact, some Pickers are intentionally cruel to wounded warriors, meaning the Pickers are more evil than the worms. The number of parallels between the Pickers and the worms indicates that Clark created the parallels intentionally. If Clark had wanted the worms to be evil, he could have made them more explicitly evil. Instead, “The Paladin of Golota” challenges the common assumption that evil-looking things are automatically evil and questions whether humans are really better than the things they condemn.

Works Cited

Clark, P. Djèlí. “The Paladin of Golota.” Heroic Fantasy Quarterly 37.