The Rise and Fall of a Dragonking - By Lynn Abbey Page 0,113
in an orderly row against the little cottage. The novice druid had restored the scorched dirt. He’d planted grain in the ground he’d tilled and tended. High as a man’s forearm, it, too, was silver in the moonlight.
Hamanu plucked a sprig and held it to his nose. He remembered the smell.
When the cloister doors were bolted shut for the last time, from the inside, Hamanu made a familiar slashing motion through the air. Netherworld mist enveloped him. He emerged beneath the palace gate-tower, a slightly built, dark-haired human youth with a leather case slung over a narrow shoulder.
The templar guards didn’t notice him, nor did anyone else. Urik’s streets were quiet, though not as doom-laden as the palace. War had been a regular occurrence throughout the Lion-King’s reign. Even siege camps beyond the ring of market villages weren’t unknown—and weren’t a source of great concern for the ordinary Urikite. After all, as the magic-voiced orators reminded them at the start of each watch: Urik has never lost a battle when the Lion-King leads her armies.
Outside the Lion-King’s inner circle of confidants and advisors, the city’s plight was not widely known. Mortal minds, Hamanu had learned long ago, were ill-suited for lengthy confrontations with despair. Let them carry their faith to the end, or to the Lion-King’s fountain in the city’s center where, by moonlight and torchlight, a small crowd had gathered.
Long, slender eel-fish swam in the fountain’s lower pools. They were bright streaks by day, dark shadows by moonlight, and sharp-toothed at any time. When a Urikite made a wish, second thoughts were ill-advised, and woe betide any light-fingered criminal who tried to skim the ceramic bits from the bottom. Those coins belonged to the Lion-King, the living god who cherished them, though he had no use for them. His eel-fish would eat just about anything, but their favorite snack was a finger or a toe.
Hamanu stood quietly to one side, watching ordinary men, women, and children whisper a prayer as they tossed their bits into the water. With his preternatural hearing, Hamanu heard what only a god should hear. Mostly they prayed for their loved ones’ safety: husbands, wives, parents, and children. Half the city was camped outside the walls tonight, catching a few winks of sleep, if they could, beside their weapons. The other half of the city fretted about their welfare. Some prayed for themselves as well, which was neither cowardice or sin in the Lion-King’s judgment. Some prayed for Urik, which was, after all, their home. And one or two—to Hamanu’s astonishment—prayed for their king—
Let him lead us to victory. Make him invincible before our enemies. Return our king, safe, to us—
As if they knew Hamanu, the Lion of Urik, was not a god at all.
He was lost in listening when he felt a tug on the hem of the plain illusory shirt he wore.
“Want to make a wish?” a little boy asked.
The boy’s thoughts were of a brother, a giant of a brother who’d been called up in the second levy a quinth ago, and of his mother, a shrunken woman on the other side of the fountain. The woman gave a shy, toothless smile when Hamanu looked at her.
“My brother’s outside,” the boy said. Neither he nor his mother had the least notion that explanations were unnecessary. “You got a brother outside? A sister? Somebody?”
He had no brothers, not for a thousand years, but Hamanu had somebody—ten thousand somebodies in yellow and mufti—outside the wall. “Yes.”
“Bigger’n stronger than you, huh?”
He was Manu tonight, this last night in Urik; it had seemed appropriate. And Manu had been an unimpressive youth, though not as spindly as the boy imagined, comparing Manu to his mountain of a brother. If he’d been real, and not illusion, Manu could have slept outside the walls tonight; the third levy would have taken him.
The boy tugged Hamanu’s shirt again. “You scared?” And where the brother had been in the boy’s thoughts, there was fear, hurt and emptiness: all that a child could understand of war.
“Yes, a little.” Manu knew better than to lie to children.
“Me, too,” the boy admitted and held out a dirty, half-size ceramic bit. “We can wish together?”
“What shall we wish for?”
The boy pressed a pudgy finger against his lips. Hamanu nodded quickly. He should have known: wishes were secrets between the wish-maker and the Lion. They tossed their bits in together: two tiny ripples in the moonlight. Not even a god could have said which was which.