The Rise and Fall of a Dragonking - By Lynn Abbey Page 0,51

my dilemma. Trolls were the enemy because, after ages of warfare, there could be no peace between us. Myron of Yoram was the enemy because he wouldn’t let his army win the war. But humanity was not the enemy. I’d kill humans without remorse if they stood between me and my enemies, but, otherwise, I had no cause against my own folk.

“Lay down your swords,” I said to’ those before me, and they did. “Call off your veterans!”

Another of the officers—a short, round-faced fellow that no other man would consider a threat in a fight but was the highest ranked of all—shouted, “Recall!” From the midst of the honor guard, a drum began to beat. I waved the armed guard aside and beheld a boy, fair-haired, freckled, and shaking with terror as he struck the recall rhythm with his leather-headed sticks.

His signal was taken up by two other drummers, each with a slight variation. The round-faced officer said there should have been five drummers answering the recall, one for each officer. The drummers were boys, not veterans, not armed. They’d been no threat to us when we attacked and rolled up their line, but the round-faced officer swore they wouldn’t have run, that they were as brave as any veteran, ten times braver than I. By the look in his eye, I understood that at least one of the boys was kin to him, one of the boys who hadn’t sounded his drum. He judged me the boy’s murderer, just as I’d once held Bult responsible for Dorean.

By my command, we searched the field, looking for the missing drummers. We found the three missing boys before sundown, their cold fingers still wrapped around their drumsticks.

Battle is glorious because you’re fighting the enemy, you’re fighting for your own life and the lives of the veterans beside you. There’s no glory, though, once the battle has ended. Agony sounds the same, whatever language the wounded spoke when they were whole, and a corpse is a tragic-looking thing whether it’s a half-grown boy or a fullgrown, warty troll.

There were more than a hundred corpses around that hilltop. I’d walked away from Deche, and the death it harbored, hardly by my own choice. When the time came, I’d buried Jikkana, and Bult, and I’d seen to it that all the others went honorably into their graves. But a hundred human corpses…

“What do we do with them?” I asked One-Eye over a cold supper of stale bread and stiff, smoked meat. “We’ll need ten days to dig their graves. We’ll be parched and starving—”

One-Eye found something fascinating in his bread and pretended not to hear me. The woman officer answered instead:

“We leave them for the kes’trekels and all the other scavengers. They’re meat, Manu. Might as well let some creature have the good of ’em. We head west at dawn tomorrow—if you want to catch those trolls.”

And we did, but not at dawn. The round-faced officer kept us waiting while he buried his boy deep in the ground, where no scavenger would disturb him.

They held me in thrall, those five officers did, with their hard eyes and easy assurance. I knew I was cleverer than Bult and all his ilk, but, though I’d taken their swords away, I felt foolish around them. My veterans saw the difference, sensed my discomfort. By the time we’d marched two days into the west, those who’d joined me before the hilltop battle and those we’d acquired in that battle’s aftermath heeded my commands, but only after they’d stolen a glance at my round-faced captive.

“Show me the trolls!” I demanded, seizing his arm and giving him a rude shake.

He staggered, almost losing his balance, almost rubbing the bruise I’d surely given him. But he kept his balance and kept the pain from showing on his face. “They’re here,” he insisted, waving his other arm across the dry prairie.

The land was as flat as the back of my hand and featureless, except farther to the southwest, where a scattering of cone-shaped mountains erupted from the grass. They were nothing like the rocky Kreegills, but trolls were a mountain folk, and I believed the officer when he said we’d find trolls to the southwest.

“The mountains move!” I complained later that day. I’d reckoned the odd-shaped peaks were closer, that we’d be among them by sundown.

There was throttled laughter behind me. As veterans were measured, I scarcely passed muster. I’d seen the Kreegills, and the heartland, but the sinking land—that’s what the officers