The Rise and Fall of a Dragonking - By Lynn Abbey Page 0,90

farmers built terraces to keep the soil in place until long-lived plants put down their roots—the valleys would bloom again. Until then, there’d be only the skeletal branches of the tallest trees reaching out of their graves.

The loss Hamanu felt as he turned away from the valleys was for Athas, not himself. There was nothing down there to remind him of what he’d lost: Deche, Dorean, his own humanity. His memory held a face he named Dorean, but were his Dorean to reappear, he wasn’t certain he’d recognize her. She’d never recognize him. The young man who’d danced for her was gone. His metamorphic body could no longer perform the intricate steps.

Ages had passed since Hamanu wished that he could weep for his lost past or wished that he was dead within it. There were no gods to grant a champion’s wishes. He’d never weep again, and he’d lived too long to throw his life away.

In his natural shape, Hamanu was taller than any troll. He looked directly at the carved inscriptions he’d once studied from the ground, and lost himself recovering their meaning from his memory.

“Can you read it?”

A voice—Windreaver’s voice—asked from behind his back. Hamanu let out a breath he’d held since Ur Draxa. He hadn’t wanted to be alone. The troll’s voice was the right voice for this place, this moment.

“‘Come, blessed sun,’” he answered, tracing the word-symbols as he translated them. “‘Warm my walls and my roof. Send your light of life through my windows and my doors.’” He paused with his finger above the last group of carvings. “This one, ‘awaken,’ and the next pair, ‘stone’ plus ‘life’—they’re on every stone in every wall. Wake up my stones? Wake up my people? I was never certain.”

“‘Arise, reborn.’ We believed the spirits of our ancestors dwelt in stone. We never mined, not like the dwarves. Mining was desecration. We waited for the stone to rise. The closer it came to the sun—we believed—the closer our ancestors were to the moment of rebirth.”

“And do you still believe?” Hamanu asked. He didn’t expect an answer, and didn’t get one.

“Who taught you to read our script?” Windreaver demanded, as if the knowledge were a sacred trust, not to be shared with outsiders, with humans especially.

“I taught myself. I was here at sunrise, whenever I could get away from my chores, imagining what it had been like. I looked at the inscriptions and asked myself: what would I have written here, if I were a troll, living in this place, watching the sun rise over my house. After a while, I believed I knew.”

Silence lengthened. Hamanu thought Windreaver had departed.

He considered issuing a command that the troll couldn’t disobey, demanding recognition for his accomplishment. He’d learned the script without assistance and, save for the two symbols that dealt with a faith he couldn’t imagine, he’d learned it correctly. But that would be a tawdry triumph in a place that deserved better. With a final caress for the carved stone, Hamanu turned and saw that he wasn’t alone.

Windreaver said something in a language Hamanu had heard only a handful of times and never understood. The troll had no substance, either in the material world or the Gray; there was no aspect of him from which a mind-bender could glean his meaning.

“I taught myself to read your script. I couldn’t teach myself to speak it. If you wish to insult me, do it in a living language.”

“I said you read well.”

The Lion-King knew his captive companion better than that. “When mekillots fly,” he challenged.

“No, you’re right. I said something else, but you read well. That’s the truth. Nothing else matters, does it—in a living language?”

“Thank you,” Hamanu replied. He didn’t want an argument, not today. But it seemed he was going to have one: Windreaver’s face had soured into an expression he hadn’t seen before. “Is it so terrible? A boy comes up here—a human boy. He imagines he’s a troll and deciphers your language.”

“What I said was: I could wish I had met that remarkable human boy.”

Hamanu studied the ground to the right of his feet. He remembered the boy’s shape, his voice, and his questions as he stood among these stones. Memory was illusion; there was no going back. “I could wish that, too. But we had no choice, no chance. Rajaat took that away before I was born. Maybe before you were born. Our paths were destined to cross on the battlefield, at the top of a dark-sky cliff,