He'd thought it would be easy, but he'd never told the whole story, the true story, to anyone—including himself— and, with the stars sliding toward dawn, he still didn't know where to start.

"Recount," he urged himself. "Begin at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end, but, at the very least, begin!"

* * *

You know me as Hamanu, the Lion of Urik, King of the World, King of the Mountains and the Plains, the Great King, the Mighty King, King of the World. I am the bulwark of war and of peace wherever I hang my shield.

My generosity is legend... and capricious. My justice is renowned... for its cruelty. My name is an instrument of vengeance whispered in shadows. My eyes are the conscience of my city.

In Urik, I am called god, and god I am, but I did not choose to be anyone's god, least of all my own.

I was not born immortal, invincible, or eternal.

I was born a human infant more than a thousand years ago, in the waning years of the 176th King's Age. As the sun ascended in the Year of Dragon's Contemplation, my mother took to the straw and bore me, the fifth of my father's sons. She named me Manu, and before my black hair dried, she had wrapped me in linen and carried me to the Gelds, where

my kin harvested himali. My father tucked a golden ear between my swaddled hands. He lifted me and the ripened grain toward the sun.

He gave thanks for the gifts of life, for healthy children and bountiful harvests. Without the gifts of life, a man would be forever poor; with them, he needed nothing more.

The women who had attended my mother and followed her to the fields passed around hot himali cakes sweetened with honey and young wine. All my kin—from my father's father's mother to a cousin born ten days before me—and the other families of Deche, our village, joined the celebration of a life beginning. Before sundown, all the women had embraced me, that I might know I was cherished. Each man had lofted me gently above his head and caught me again, that I might know the safety of strong hands around me. I remember this because my mother often told me the story while I was still young and because such were the customs of a Deche family whenever a child was born. Yet, I also remember the day of my birth because now I am Hamanu and my memory is not what it was when I was a mortal man. I remember everything that has happened to me. After a thousand years, most of what I remember is a repetition of something else; I cannot always say with certainty when a thing happened, only that it did, many, many times.

Deche was a pleasant, prosperous place to be a child. It was pleasant because every family was well housed and well fed; my grandfather's family was the best housed and best fed of all. It was prosperous because the Cleansing Wars had raged since the 174th King's Age, and armies always need what villages provide: fighters and food.

Deche owed its existence to the wars. My ancestors had followed Myron Troll-Scorcher's first sweep through the northeastern heartland when the Rebirth races— humankind's younger cousins: elves, dwarves, trolls, gnomes, pixies, and all the others except halflings—were cast out. My ancestors were farmers, though, not fighters. Once the army turned the trolls into refugees, my ancestors settled in a Kreegill Mountain valley, east of Yaramuke.

But Deche had never been a troll village. The trolls were mountain dwellers, stone-men—miners and quarriers. Throughout their history, they traded with the other races for their food and necessities. That was their mistake, their doom.

Dependence made them vulnerable. Myron of Yoram— the first Troll-Scorcher—could have sealed the trolls in the Kreegills and their other strongholds. He could have starved them out in a score of years. He would have needed sorcery, of course, if he'd besieged them, and sorcery would have laid waste to the Kreegills. The valleys would have become ash and dust. Deche wouldn't have been founded. I wouldn't have been born....

So much would have been different if Myron Troll-Scorcher had been different. Not better, certainly not for Urik, which would never have risen to glory without me. Simply different. But Myron of Yoram was what he was: a vast, sweeping fool who drove the trolls out of the Kreegills with a vast, sweeping advance. He turned the stone-men into the stone-hearted fighters that his army could never again defeat.

Later, when I was the Troll-Scorcher, it was different. Much different. But that was later.

When I was born, the pixies were gone, the ogres and the centaurs, too. The center of the heartland—what was left of the once-green heartland after the Pixie-Blight, the Ogre-Naught, and the Centaur-Crusher had purged those races from it—belonged to humankind. The remaining wars were fought along the perimeter. Myron of Yoram fought trolls in the far northeast, where the barrens reach beyond sunrise to the middle of last night.

Once the trolls abandoned the Kreegills, it was destiny that human farmers would clear the valleys. All the rest was destiny, too.

After my birth, my destiny was tied to the Troll-Scorcher in ways that no one in Deche had the wisdom or magic to foresee. We weren't ignorant of our place in the Cleansing Wars. Twice a year, our grain-loaded wagons rumbled down to the plains where the Troll-Scorcher's bailiffs bought and sold. Men went down with the wagons; women, too. They gave their names to the bailiffs and got a weapon in return.

Sometimes—not often—veterans returned to Deche. My middle brother didn't, but an uncle had, years before I was born. He'd lost one leg above the knee, the other below, to a single swipe from a troll-held axe. In time, all of his children made their way to the bailiffs. One of those cousins returned when I was ten. He had all his limbs, but his eyes were haunted, and his wits had been seared. He cried out in his dreams, and his wife would not sleep beside him. I asked him what had happened, what had he seen?

My cousin's words frightened me. I saw what he had seen, as if it were my own memory... as it is my own memory, now. When the Troll-Scorcher slew, he slew by fire that consumed from within. That was Rajaat's sorcery: all his champions can kill anything with a thought. Each champion had and retains a unique killing way that brings terror as well as death. But I was ten and ignorant of my destiny. With frightened tears on my cheeks, I ran from my cousin to my father.

"Don't make me go. Don't send me to the trolls! I don't want to see the fire-eyes!"

Father held me in his arms until I was myself again. He told me there was never any shortage of folk who wanted to join the Troll-Scorcher's army. If I didn't want to fight, I could stay in Deche all my life, if I wanted to, as he, my father, had done. As I clung to him, believing his words with all my heart and taking comfort from them, Dorean joined us. Silently, she took my hand between hers and brought it to her cheek.

She kissed my trembling fingertips.

It was likely that Dorean was a few years older than I; no one knew for certain. She'd been born far to the east of the Kreegills, where the war between the trolls and the Troll-Scorcher was an everyday reality. Maybe she'd been born in a village. More likely she'd been born in one of the wagons that followed the army wherever it went. Then her luck ran out. Myron of Yoram, whose idea of a picket line was a man holding the thong of a sack of rancid broy, left his flank unguarded. Troll marauders nipped his ribs, and Dorean was an orphan.

The bailiffs brought her out of danger; they did that out of their own conscience—loading their empty wagons with orphans and the wounded and bringing them back where trolls hadn't been seen in generations. Later, when the army was mine, I would remember what the bailiffs had done and reward them. But that day when I was ten and I looked beyond my father's arms, my eyes beheld Dorean's beauty for the first time, and the untimely vision of living torches was banished from my mind's eye.

"I will stay with you, Manu."

Surely Dorean had spoken to me before, but I had never truly heard her voice and, though I was young, I knew that I had found the missing piece of my heart.

"I will take Dorean as my wife," I told my father, my tears and fears already forgotten. "I will build her a house beneath the cool trees, and she will give me children. You must tell Grandfather. He cannot handfast her with anyone else."

Tags: Lynn Abbey Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net