The Song of Homana (29 page)

A cradle. And the child held face-down to float within the Womb.

“Duncan?” I whispered it, fearing my voice would upset the balance. “Is it supposed to be this way?”

But Duncan was gone, leaving me completely alone, and I knew why he had done it. Finn had said little of Cheysuli manhood rites, since most warriors were judged fully grown by the bonding of the
lir
, but I thought there might be more. And I would remain ignorant of it, being Homanan and therefore unblessed, unless this was the way to discover what made the Cheysuli, Cheysuli.

Tonight I will make you a king
.

A king? I wondered. Or a madman? Fear can crush a soul.

I did not move. I hung. I listened. I wondered if Duncan would return to see how I fared. I would hear him. I would hear the grate of stone upon stone, even the subtle silence of his movements. I would hear him because I listened so well, with the desperation of a man wishing to keep his mind. And if he came back, I would shout for him to let me out.

Probably I would beg.

Go in a prince and come out a Mujhar
.

Gods, would it be worth it?

Air. I breathed. There was no flavor to it, no stench to make it foul. Just air. From somewhere trickled the air that kept me alive; perhaps there were holes I could use to escape.

I hung in total silence. When I turned my head, slowly, I heard the grating pop of spinal knots untying. I heard my hair rasp against my shoulders. Hardly sounds. Mostly whispers. And yet I heard them.

I heard also the beating begin:
pa-thump, pa-thump, pa-thump
.

Footsteps? No. Duncan? No.

Pa-thump, pa-thump, pa-thump
.

I heard the wind inside my head, the raucous hissing roar. Noise, so much noise, hissing inside my head. I shut my eyes and tried to shut off my ears.

Pa-thump, pa-thump, pa-thump
.

I hung. Naked and quite alone, lost within the darkness.

The Womb of the Earth. A child again, I was; an unborn soul caught within the Womb. It was the beating of my own heart I heard, the noise of silence inside my head. A child again, was I, waiting to be born.

“Duncannnn—!”

I shut my eyes. I hung. The chill of fear began to fade. I lost my sense of touch, the knowledge I was held.

I floated.

Silence.

Floating
—

No warmth. No cold. Nothingness. I floated in the absence of light, of sound, of touch, taste and smell. I did not exist.

I waited with endless patience.

Ringing
. Like sword upon sword. Ringing.
Noise
—

It filled my head until I could taste it. I could smell it. It sat on my tongue with the acrid tang of blood. Had I bitten myself? No. I had no blood. Only flesh, depending from the ropes.

My eyes, I knew, were open. They stared. But I was blind. I saw only darkness, the absolute absence of light.
And then it came up and struck me in the face, and the light of the world fell upon me.

I cried out. Too much, too much—will you blind me with the light?

It will make you, however briefly, one of us
.

“Duncan?”

The whisper I mouthed was a shout. I recoiled in my ropes and recalled I had a body. A body. With two arms, two legs, a head. Human. Male. Carillon of Homana.

You will know, for a moment, what it is to be Cheysuli
.

But I did not.

I knew nothing.

I thought only of being born.

I heard the rustling of wings. The scrape of talons. Cai? No. Duncan had left him behind.

Soughing of wings spread, stretching, folding, Preening. The pipping chirp of a falcon; the fierce shriek of a hunting hawk. The scream of an angry eagle.

Birds. All around me birds. I felt the breath of their wings against my face, the caress of many feathers. How I wanted to join them, to feel the wind against my wings and know the freedom of the skies. To dance. Oh, to dance upon the wind—

I felt the subtle seduction. I opened my mouth and shouted: “I am man, not bird!
Man
, not beast!
Man
, not shapechanger!”

Silence soothed me.
Pa-thump, pa-thump, pa-thump
.

∗   ∗   ∗

I ran. Four-legged, I ran. With a tail slashing behind me, I ran. And knew the glory of such freedom.

The warm earth beneath my paws, catching in the curving nails. The smells of trees and sky and grass and brush. The joyousness of playful flight; to leap across the creeks. The hot red meat of prey taken down; the taste of flesh in my mouth. But most of all the freedom, the utter, perfect freedom, to cast off cares and think only of the day. The moment. Not yesterday, not tomorrow; the day. The moment.
Now
.

And to know myself a
lir
.

Lir?
I stopped. I stood in the shadow of a wide-boled beech. The glittering of sunlight through the leaves spattered gems across my path.

Lir?

Wolf. Like Storr: silver-coated, amber-eyed. With such grace as a man could never know.

How
? I asked.
How is it done
?

Finn had never been able to tell me in words I could understand.
Lir
and warrior and
lir
, he had said, knowing no other way. To part them was to give them over to death, be it quick or slow. The great yawning emptiness would lead directly into madness, and sooner death than such an end.

For the first time I knew the shapechange. I felt it in my bones, be they wolf’s or man’s. I felt the essence of myself run out into the soil until the magic could be tapped.

The void. The odd, distorted image of a man as he exchanged his shape for another. He
changed his shape
at will, by giving over the human form to the earth. It spilled out of him, sloughing off his bones, even as the bones themselves altered. What was not needed in
lir
-shape, such as clothing, weapons and too much human weight, went into storage in the earth, protected by the magic. An exchange. Give over excess and receive the smaller form.

Magic. Powerful magic, rooted in the earth. I felt the heavy hair rise upon my hackles, so that I saw the transformation. Of soul as well as flesh.

I knew the void for what it was. I understood why it
existed. The gods had made it as a ward against the dazzled eyes of humans who saw the change. For to see flesh and bone before you melt into the ground, to be remade into another shape, might be too much for even the strongest to bear. And so mystery surrounded the change, and magic, and the hint of sorcery. No man, seeing the change for what it was, would ever name the Cheysuli
men
.

And now, neither could I.

The fear came down to swallow me whole and I recoiled against my ropes.

Ropes. I hung in the pit. A man, not a wolf; not a beast. But until I acknowledged what the Cheysuli were, I would never be Mujhar.

Homana was Cheysuli
.

I felt the madness come out of my mouth. “Accept!” I shouted. “Accept this man, this Mujhar!”

Silence.

“Ja’hai!”
I shouted.
“Ja’hai, cheysu, ja’hai—Ja’hai, cheysu, Mujhar!”

“Carillon.”

“Ja’hai,”
I panted.
“Ja’hai!” O gods, accept. O gods, acceptAcceptAccept—

“Carillon.”

If they did not—if they did not—

“Carillon.”

Flesh on flesh.
Flesh on flesh
. A hand supporting my head.

“
Jehana
?” I rasped.
“Jehana? Ja’hai…jehana, ja’hai—”

Two hands were on my head. They held it up. They cradled it, like a child too weak to lift himself up. I lay against the cold stone floor on my back, and a shadow was kneeling over me.

My blinded eyes could only see shape. Male. Not my
jehana
.

“Jehan?”
I gasped.

“No,” he said. “
Rujholli
. In this, for this moment, we are.” The hands tightened a moment. “
Rujho
, it is over.”

“Ja’hai—?”

“Ja’hai-na,”
he said soothingly.
“Ja’hai-na Homana Mujhar
. You are born.”

BornBornBorn. “Ja’hai-na?”

“Accepted,” he said gently. “The king of all blood is born.”

The Homanan was back on my tongue, but the voice was hardly human. “But I am not.” Suddenly, I knew it. “I am only a
Homanan
.”

“For four days you have been Cheysuli. It will be enough.”

I swallowed. “There is no light. I can barely see you.” All I
could
see was the darker shape of his body against the cream-colored walls, and the looming of the
lir
.

“I left the torch in the staircase and the door is mostly shut. Until you are ready, it is best this way.”

My eyes ached. It was from the light, scarce though it was, as it crept around the opening in the wall. It gleamed on his gold and nearly blinded me with its brilliance: it made the scar a black line across his face.

Scar. Not Duncan. Finn.

“
Finn
—” I tried to sit up and could not. I lacked the strength.

He pressed me down again. “Make no haste. You are not—whole, just yet.”

Not whole? What
was
I then—?

“Finn—” I broke off. “Am I out? Out of the oubliette?” It seemed impossible to consider.

He smiled. It chased away the strain and weariness I saw stretching the flesh of his shadowed face. “You are out of the Womb of the Earth. Did I not say you had been born?”

The marble was hard beneath my naked body. I drew up my legs so I could see my knees, to see if I was whole. I was. In body, if not in mind. “Am I gone mad? Is that what you meant?”

“Only a little, perhaps. But it will pass. It is not—” He broke off a moment. “It is not a thing we have done very often, this forcing of a birth. It is never easy on the infant.”

I sat up then, thrusting against the cold stone floor. Suddenly I was another man entirely. Not Carillon. Something else. Something drove me up onto my knees. I
knelt, facing Finn, staring into his eyes. So yellow, even in the darkness. So perfectly
bestial
—

I put up a hand to my own. I could not touch the color. They had been blue…I wondered now what they were. I wondered what
I
was…

“A man,” Finn said.

I shut my eyes. I sat very still in the darkness, knowing light only by the faint redness across my lids. I heard my breathing as I had heard it in the pit.

And
pa-thump, pa-thump, pa-thump
.

“Ja’hai-na,”
Finn said gently.

“Ja’hai-na Homana Mujhar.”
I reached out and caught his wrist before he could respond. I realized it had been the first time I had out-thought him, anticipating his movement. My fingers were clamped around his wrist as he had once clasped mine, preparing to cut it open. I had no knife, but he did. I had only to put out my other hand and take it.

I smiled. It was flesh beneath my fingers, blood beneath the flesh. He would bleed as I had bled. A man, and capable of dying. Not a sorcerer, who might live forever.

Not like Tynstar. Cheysuli, not Ihlini.

I looked at his hand. He did not attempt to move. He merely waited. “Is it difficult to accomplish?” I asked. “When you put your
self
into the earth, and take out another form? I have seen you do it. I have seen the expression on your face, while the face is still a face, and not hidden by the void.” I paused. “There is a need in me to know.”

The dilation turned his eyes black. “There are no Homanan words—”

“Then give me Cheysuli words. Say it in the Old Tongue.”

He smiled. “
Sul’harai
, Carillon. That is what it is.”

That I had heard before. Once. We had sat up one night in Caledon, lost in our jugs of
usca
, and spoke as men will about women, saying what we liked. Much had not been said aloud, but we had known. In our minds had been Alix. But out of that night had come a single complex word:
sul’harai
. It encompassed that which was perfect in the union of man and woman, almost a holy thing. And though the Homanan language lacked the proper words for him, I had heard it in his tone.

Sul’harai
. When a man was a woman and a woman a man, two halves of a whole, for that single fleeting instant. And so at last I knew the shapechange.

Finn moved to the nearest wall and sat against it, resting his forearms on his drawn-up knees. Black hair fell into his face; it needed cutting, as usual. But what I noticed most was how he resembled the
lir
-shapes upon the wall, even in human form. There is something predatory about the Cheysuli. Something that makes them wild.

“When did you come back?”

He smiled. “That is a Carillon question; I think you are recovered.” He shifted. Behind him was a hawk with open wings. The stone seemed to encase his shoulders so that he appeared to be sprouting wings. But no, that was his brother’s gift. “Two days ago I came. The palace was in an uproar: the Mujhar, it was said, had gone missing. Assassination? No. But it took Duncan to tell me, quite calmly, he had brought you here to be born.”

I scrubbed an arm across my head. “Did you know about this place?”

“I knew it was here. Not where, precisely. And I did not know he had intended such a thing.” His brow creased. “He reprimanded me because I had risked you in the star magic, and yet he brought you down here and risked you all over again. I do not understand him.”