The Song of Homana (10 page)

The main track led directly to the castle. Joyenne proper, built upon a hill, with walls and towers and the glittering glass of leaded, mullioned casements. My father had taken great joy in establishing a home of which to be proud. Joyenne was where we lived, not fought; it was not a bastion to ward off the enemy but a place in which to rear children. But the gods had seen fit to give them stillborn sons and daughters, until Torry and then myself.

Joyenne was awash with sunlight, gold and bronze and brown. The ocher-colored stone my father had chosen had bleached to a soft, muted color, so that the sunlight glinted off corners and trim. Against the snowy hill it was a great blot of towered, turreted stone, ringed by walls and ramparts. There was an iron portcullis at the frontal gate, but rarely was it ever brought down. At least in my father’s day. Joyenne had been open to all then, did they need to converse with their lord.

Now, however, the great mortar mouth was toothed with iron. Men walked the walls with halberds in their hands. Ringmail glinted silver in the sunlight. Bellam’s banner hung from the staffs at each tower: a rising white sun on an indigo field.

Because I was a poor man and fouled with the grime of years, I did not go to the central gate. I went instead to a smaller one, stooped and crooked and hitching my leg along. The guards stopped me at once, speaking in poor Homanan. What was it, they asked, I wanted?

To see my mother, I said civilly, showing stained and rotting teeth. The scent of the gum was foul and sent them, cursing, two steps back. My mother, I repeated in a thick and phlegmy voice. The one who served within the castle.

I named a name, knowing there was indeed a woman who served the hall. I could not say if still she lived—she had been old when I had gone to war—but a single question would tell the men I did not lie. She had had a son, I knew, a son twisted from childhood disease. He had gone away to another village—her everlasting shame—but now, I thought, he would come back. However briefly.

The guards consulted, watching me with disgusted, arrogant eyes. They spoke in Solindish, which I knew not at all, but their voices gave them away. My stink and my grease and my twisted body had shielded me from closer inspection.

Weaponed? they asked gruffly.

No. I put out my hands as if inviting them to search. They did not. Instead they waved me through.

And thus Carillon came home again, to see his lady mother.

I hitched and shuffled and stooped, wiping my arm beneath my nose, spreading more grease and fouling my beard. I crossed the cobbled bailey slowly, almost hesitantly, as if I feared to be sent away again. The Solindishmen who passed me looked askance, offended by my stink. I showed them my yellowed, resined teeth in the sort of grin a dog gives, to show his submission; to show he knows his place.

By my appearance, I would be limited to the kitchens (or the midden). It was where the woman had served. But my lady mother would be elsewhere, so I passed by the kitchens and went up to the halls, scraping my wet buskins across the wood of the floor.

There were few servants. I thought Bellam had sent most of them away in an attempt to humble my mother. For him, a usurper king, it would be important to wage war even against a woman. Gwynneth of Homana had been wed to the Mujhar’s brother; a widow now, and helpless, but royal nonetheless. It would show his power if he humbled this woman so. But I thought it was unlikely he had succeeded, no matter how many guards he placed on the walls; no matter how many Solindish banners fluttered from the towers.

I found the proper staircase, winding in a spiral to an upper floor. I climbed, sensing the flutter in my belly. I had come this far, so far, and yet a single mistake could have me taken. Bellam’s retribution, no doubt, would see me kept alive for years. Imprisoned and humiliated and tortured.

I passed out of the staircase into a hall, paneled in honey-gold wood. My father’s gallery, boasting mullioned
windows that set the place to glittering in the sun. But the beeswax polish had grown stale and dark, crusted at the edges. The gallery bore the smell of disuse and disinterest.

My hand slipped up between the folds of my soiled tunic, sliding through a rent in the cloth. I closed my fingers around the bone-handled hilt of my Caledonese knife. For a moment I stood at the polished wooden door of my mother’s solarium, listening for voices within. I heard nothing. It was possible she spent her time elsewhere, but I had learned that men or women, in trying circumstances, will cling to what they know. The solar had ever been a favorite place. And so, when I was quite certain she was alone, I swung open the oiled panel.

I moved silently. I closed the door without a sound. I stood within the solar and looked at my mother, and realized she had grown old.

Her head was bent over an embroidery frame. What she stitched there I could not say, save it took all her attention to do it. The sunlight burned through the mullioned panes of the narrow casement nearest her and splashed across her work, turning the colored threads brilliant in the dimness of the room. I noticed at once there was a musty smell, as if the dampness of winter had never been fully banished by the warmth of the brazier fires. This had ever been a warm, friendly room, but now it was cold and barren.

I saw how she stitched at the fabric. Carefully, brows furrowed, in profile to me. And her hands—

Twisted, brittle, fragile things, knobbed with buttons of flesh at her knuckles and more like claws than fingers. So painstakingly she stitched, and yet with those hands I doubted she could do little more than thrust needle through fabric with little regard for the pattern. Disease had taken the skill from her.

I recalled then, quite clearly, how her hands had pained her in the dampness. How she had never complained, but grew more helpless with each month. And now, looking at her, I saw how the illness had destroyed the grace my father had so admired.

She wore a white wimple and coif to hide her hair, but a single loop escaped to curve down the line of her cheek.
Gray, all gray, when before it had been tawny as my own. Her face was creased with the soft, fine lines of age, like crumpled silk.

She had put on indigo blue, ever a favorite color with her. I thought I recognized the robe as an old one she had given up more than seven years before. And yet she wore it now, threadbare and thin and hardly worthy of her station.

Perhaps I made a sound. She lifted her head, searching, and her eyes came around to me.

I went to her and knelt down. All the words I had thought to say were flown. I had nothing but silence in my mouth and a painful cramping in my throat.

I stared hard at the embroidery in her lap. She had let it fall, forgotten, and I saw that the pattern—though ill-made—was familiar. A tall, bearded soldier on a great chestnut stallion, leading the Mujhar’s army. I had loved it as a child, for she had called the man my father. It seemed odd that I would look now and see myself.

Her hand was on my head. At first I wanted to flinch away, knowing how foul the grease and dye had made me, but I did not move. With her other hand she set her fingers beneath my chin and turned up my face, so she could look upon me fully. Her smile was brilliant to see, and the tears ran down her face.

I reached out and caught her hands gently, afraid I might break them. They were so fragile in my own. I felt huge, overlarge, much too rough for her delicacy.

“Lady.” My voice came out clogged and uneven. “I have been remiss in not coming to you sooner. Or sending word—”

Fingers closed my mouth. “No.” She touched my beard lingeringly, then ran both hands through my filthy hair. “Was this through choice, or have you forgotten all the care I ever taught you?”

I laughed at her, though it had a hollow, brittle sound. “Exile has fashioned your son into another sort of man, I fear.”

The lines around her eyes—blue as my own—deepened. And then she took her hands away as if she had finished with me entirely. I realized, in that instant, she was
sacrificing the possessiveness she longed to show me. In her eyes I saw joy and pride and thankfulness, and a deep recognition of her son as a man. She was giving me my freedom.

I rose unsteadily, as if I had been too long without food. Her smile grew wider. “Fergus lives on in you.”

I walked to the casement, overcome for the moment, and stared out blindly to watch the guards upon the ramparts. When I could, I turned back. “You know why I have come.”

Her chin lifted. I saw the delicate, draped folds of the silken wimple clustered at her throat. “I was wed to your father for thirty-five years. I bore him six children. It was the gods who decreed only two of those children would live to adulthood, but I am quite certain they have learned, both of them, what it is to be part of the House of Homana.” The pride made her nearly young again. “Of course I know why you have come.”

“And your answer?”

It surprised her. “What answer is there to duty? You
are
the House of Homana, Carillon—what is left for you to do but take back your throne from Bellam?”

I had expected no different, and yet it seemed passing strange to hear such matter-of-factness from my mother. Such things from a father are never mentioned, being known so well, but now I lacked a father. And it was my mother who gave me leave to go to war.

I moved away from the window. “Will you come with me? Now?”

She smiled. “No.”

I made an impatient gesture. “I have planned for it. You will put on the clothes of a kitchen servant and walk out of here with me. It can be done.
I
have done it. It is too obvious for them to suspect.” I touched my fouled, bearded face. “Grease your hair, sully your skirts, affect the manners of a servant. It is your life at risk—you will do well enough.”

“No,” she said again. “Have you forgotten your sister?”

“Torry is in Homana-Mujhar.” I thought it answer enough as I glanced out the casement again. “It is somewhat more difficult for me to get into Homana-Mujhar, but once we
are safely gone from here, then I will turn my plans to Torry.”

“No,” she repeated, and at last she had my complete attention. “Carillon, I doubt not you have thought this out well, but I cannot undertake it. Tourmaline is in danger. She is hostage to Bellam against just this sort of thing; do you think he would sit and do nothing?” I saw the anguish in her eyes as she looked into my frowning face. “He would learn, soon enough, I had gotten free of his guards. And he would turn to punish your sister.”

I crossed to her at once, bending to catch her shoulders in my hands. “I cannot leave you here! Do you think I could live with myself, knowing you are here? You have only to look at this room, stripped bare of its finery and left cold, no doubt to freeze your bones. Mother—”

“No one harms me,” she said clearly. “No one beats me. I am fed. I am merely kept as you see me, like a pauper-woman.” The twisted hands reached up to touch my leather-clad wrists. “I know what you have risked, coming here. And were Tourmaline safe, I would come with you. But I will not give her over to Bellam’s wrath.”

“He did it on purpose, to guard against my coming.” That truth was something I should have realized long ago, and had not. “Divide the treasure and the thieves are defeated.” I cursed once, then tried to catch back the words, for she was my lady mother.

She smiled, amused, while the tears stood in her eyes. “I cannot. Do you understand? I thought you were dead, and my daughter lost. But now you are here, safe and whole, and I have some hope again. Go from here and do what you must, but go without me to hinder you.” She put out her hands as I sought to speak. “See you how I am? I would be a burden. And that I refuse, when you have a kingdom to win back.”

I laughed, but there was nothing of humor in it. “All my fine plans are disarranged. I thought to win you free of here and take you to my army, where you would be safe. And then I would set about planning to take Torry—or take Homana-Mujhar.” I sighed and shook my head, sensing the pain of futility in my soul. “You have put me in my place.”

“Your place is Homana-Mujhar.” She rose, still clasping my hands with her brittle, twisted fingers. “Go there. Win your throne and your sister’s freedom. And then I will go where you bid me.”

I caught her in my arms and then, aghast, set her aside with a muttered oath. Filthy as I was—

She laughed. She touched the smudge of grease on her crumpled-silk face and laughed, and then she cried, and this time when I hugged her I did not set her at once aside.

I went out of Joyenne as I had gone in: with great care. Stooping and hitching I limped along, head down, making certain I did not hasten. I went out the same gate I had come in, muttering something to the Solindish guards, who responded with curses and an attempt to trip me into a puddle of horse urine pooling on the cobbles. Perhaps falling would have been best, but my natural reflexes took over and kept me from sprawling as the leg shot out to catch my ankle. I recalled my guise at once and made haste to stumble and cry out, and when I drew myself up it was to laughter and murmured insults in the Solindish tongue. And so I went away from my home and into the village to think.

My mother had the right of it. Did I take her out of Joyenne, Bellam would know instantly I had come back, and where. Who else would undertake to win my mother free? She had spent five years in captivity within her own home and no one had gotten her out. Only I would be so interested as to brave the Solindish guards.

It is a humbling feeling to know all your plans have been made for naught, when you should have known it at the outset. Finn, I thought, would have approached it differently. Or approached it not at all.

I retrieved my horse from the hostler at a dingy tavern and went at once, roundabout, to the rowan tree to unearth my sword and bow. It felt good to have both in my
hands again, and to slough off the tension my journey into Joyenne had caused me. I hung my sword at my hips again, strapped on the Cheysuli bow, and mounted the gelding once more.

I rode out across the snowfields and headed home again. To a different home, an army, where men planned and drilled and waited. To where Homana’s future waited. And I wondered how it had come to pass men would claim a single realm their own, when the gods had made it for all.