The Song of Homana

by Jennifer Roberson

  Jennifer Roberson writes:

  “The Chronicles of the Cheysuli is a dynastic fantasy, the story of a proud, honorable race brought down by the avarice, evil and sorcery of others—and its own special brand of magic. It’s the story of an ancient race blessed by the old gods of their homeland, and cursed by the sorcerers who desire domination over all men. It’s a dynasty of good and evil; love and hatred; pride and strength. Most of all it deals with the destiny in every man and his struggle to shape it, follow it, deny it.”

  DAW titles by Jennifer Roberson

  THE SWORD-DANCER SAGA

  SWORD-DANCER

  SWORD-SINGER

  SWORD-MAKER

  SWORD-BREAKER

  SWORD-BORN

  SWORD-SWORN

  SWORD-BOUND

  CHRONICLES OF THE CHEYSULI

  SHAPECHANGERS

  THE SONG OF HOMANA

  LEGACY OF THE SWORD

  TRACK OF THE WHITE WOLF

  A PRIDE OF PRINCES

  DAUGHTER OF THE LION

  FLIGHT OF THE RAVEN

  A TAPESTRY OF LIONS

  THE GOLDEN KEY

  (with Melanie Rawn and Kate Elliott)

  ANTHOLOGIES

  (as editor)

  RETURN TO AVALON

  HIGHWAYMEN: ROBBERS AND ROGUES

  THE SONG OF HOMANA

  Chronicles of the Cheysuli: Book Two

  Jennifer Roberson

  Copyright ©, 1985, by Jennifer Roberson O’Green

  All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-65128-5

  Cover art by Julek Heller.

  DAW Collectors’ Book No. 635

  The scanning, uploading and distribution via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.

  First Printing, July 1985

  PRINTED IN THE USA

  To Marion Zimmer Bradley,

  for daydreams and realities

  and

  Betsy Wollheim,

  for making mine better

  Table of Contents

  Part I

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Part II

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  PART I

  ONE

  I peered through the storm, trying to see Finn. He rode ahead on a small Steppes pony much like my own, though brown instead of dun, little more than an indistinct lump of darkness in the blowing snow. The wind beat against my face; Finn would not hear me unless I shouted against it. I pulled the muffling wraps of wool away from my face, grimacing as the bitter wind blew ice crystals into my beard, and shouted my question to him.

  “Do you see anything?”

  The indistinct lump became more distinct as Finn turned back in the saddle. Like me, he wore leather and wool and furs, hooded and wrapped, hardly a man underneath all the layers. But then Finn was not what most men would name a man at all, being Cheysuli.

  He pulled wrappings from his face. Unlike me, he wore no beard in an attempt at anonymity; the Cheysuli cannot grow them. Something in the blood, Finn had said once, kept them from it. But what he did not have on his face was made up for on his head; Finn’s hair, of late infrequently cut, was thick and black. It blew in the wind, baring a sun-bronzed predator’s face.

  “I have sent Storr ahead to seek shelter,” he called back to me. “Is there such a place in all this snow, he will find it.”

  Instantly my eyes went to the side of the narrow forest track. There, parallelling the hoofprints of our horses—though glimpsed only briefly in the blowing snow and wind—were the pawprints of a wolf. Large prints, well-spaced, little more than holes until the wind and snow filled them in. But it marked the path of Finn’s lir nonetheless; it marked Finn a man apart, for what manner of man rides with a wolf at his side? Better yet, it marked me, for what manner of man rides with a shapechanger at his side?

  Finn did not go on at once. He waited, saying nothing more. His face was still bared to the wind. As I rode up I saw how he slitted his eyes, the pupils swollen black against the blinding whiteness. But the irises were a clear, eerie yellow. Not amber or gold or honey. Yellow.

  Beast-eyes, men called them. I had reason to know why.

  I shivered, then cursed, trying to strip my beard of ice. Of late we had spent our time in the warmth of eastern lands; it felt odd to be nearly home again, and suffering because of the winter. I had forgotten what it was to go so encumbered by furs and wool and leather.

  And yet I had forgotten nothing. Especially who I was.

  Finn, seeing my shiver, grinned, baring his teeth in a silent laugh. “Weary of it already? And will you spend your time shivering and bemoaning the storms when you walk the halls and corridors of Homana-Mujhar again?”

  “We are not even in Homana yet,” I reminded him, disliking his easy assurance, “let alone my uncle’s palace.”

  “Your palace.” For a moment he studied me solemnly, reminding me of someone else: his brother. “Do you doubt yourself? Still? I thought you had resolved all that when you decided it was time for us to turn our backs on exile.”

  “I did.” I scraped at my beard with gloved fingers, stripping it again of the cold crystals. “Five years is long enough for any man to spend in exile; it is too long for a prince. It is time we took my throne back from that Solindish usurper.”

  Finn shrugged. “You will. The prophecy of the Firstborn is quite definite. You will win back the Lion Throne from Bellam and his Ihlini sorcerer, and take your place as Mujhar.” He put out his gloved right hand and made an eloquent gesture: fingers spread, palm turned upward. Tahlmorra. The Cheysuli philosophy that each man’s fate rested in the hands of the gods.

  Well, so be it. So long as the gods made me a king in place of Bellam.

  The arrow sliced through the storm and struck deeply into the ribs of Finn’s horse. The animal screamed and bolted sideways in a twisting lunge. Deep snowdrifts fouled the gelding’s legs and belly almost immediately and he went down, floundering. Blood ran out of his nostrils; it spilled from the wound and splashed against the snow, staining it brilliant crimson.

  I unsheathed my sword instantly, jerking it free of the scabbard on my saddle. I spun my horse, cursing, and saw Finn’s outthrust arm as he leaped free of his failing mount. “Three of them…now!”

  The first man reached me. We engaged. He carried a sword as I did, swinging it like a scythe as he sought to cut off my head. I heard the familiar sounds: the keening of the blade as it slashed through the air, the laboring of his mount, the hissing of breath between his teeth as he grunted with the effort. I heard also my own grinding teeth as I swung my heavy broadsword. I felt the satisfactory jar of blade against body, though his winter furs muffled most of the impact. Still, it was enough to double him in the saddle and weaken his counterthrust. My own blade went through leathers and into flesh, slowed by the leathers, then quickened by the flesh. A thrust with my shoulder behind it, and the man was dead.

  I jerk
ed the sword free instantly and spun my horse yet again, cursing his small size and wishing for a Homanan warhorse as he faltered. He had been chosen for anonymity’s sake, not for his war-sense. And now I must pay for it.

  I looked for Finn. I saw instead the wolf. I saw also the dead man, gape-mouthed and bleeding in the snow; the third and final man was still ahorse, staring blankly at the wolf. It was no wonder. He had witnessed the shapechange, which was enough to make a grown man cry out in fear; I did not only because I had seen it so many times. And yet I feared it still.

  The wolf was large and ruddy. It leaped even as the attacker cried out and tried to flee. Swept out of the saddle and thrown down against the snow, the man lay sprawled, crying out, arms thrust upward to protect his throat. But the teeth were already there.

  “Finn!” I slapped my horse’s rump with the flat of my bloodied blade, forcing him through the deep drifts. “Finn,” I said more quietly, “it is somewhat difficult to question a dead man.”

  The wolf, standing over the quivering form, turned his head to stare directly at me. The unwavering gaze was unnerving, for it was a man’s eyes set into the ruddy, snow-dusted head. A man’s eyes that stared out of the wolf’s head.

  Then came the blurring of the wolf-shape. It coalesced into a void, a nothingness that hurt the eyes and head and made my belly lurch upward against my ribs. Only the eyes remained the same, fixed on me: bestial and yellow and strange. The eyes of a madman, or the eyes of a Cheysuli warrior.

  I felt the prickling down my spine even as I sought to suppress it. The blurring came back as the void dissipated, but this time the faint outline was that of a man. No more the wolf but a two-legged, dark-skinned man. Not human; never that. Something else. Something more.

  I shifted forward in the saddle, urging my horse closer. The little gelding was chary of it, smelling death on Finn’s mount as well as on the first two men, but he went closer at last. I reined him in beside the prisoner who lay on his back in deep snow, staring wide-eyed up at the man who had been a wolf.

  “You,” I said, and saw the eyes twitch and shift over to me. He wanted to rise; I could see it. He was frightened and helpless as he lay sprawled in the snow, and I meant him to acknowledge it. “Speak,” I told him, “who is your master?”

  He said nothing. Finn took a single step toward him, saying nothing at all. The man began to speak.

  I suppressed my twitch of surprise. Homanan, not Ellasian. I had not heard the tongue for five years, except from Finn’s mouth; even now we kept ourselves to Caledonese and Ellasian almost always. And yet, here in Ellas, we heard Homanan again.

  He did not look at Finn. He looked at me. I saw the fear, and then I saw the shame and anger. “What choice did I have?” he asked from his back in the snow. “I have a wife and daughter and no way to support them. No way to clothe them, feed them, keep them warm in winter. My croft is gone because I could not pay the rents. My money was spent in the war. My son was lost with Prince Fergus. Do I let my wife and daughter starve because I cannot provide? Do I lose my daughter to the depravity of Bellam’s court?” He glared at me from malignant brown eyes. As he spoke the anger grew and the shame faded. All that was left was hostility and desperation. “I had no choice! It was good gold that was offered—”

  The knife twisted in my belly, though the blade did not exist. “Bloodied gold,” I interrupted, knowing what he would say.

  “Aye!” he shouted. “But worth it! Shaine’s war got me nothing but a dead son, the loss of my croft and the beggaring of my family. What else am I to do? Bellam offers gold—bloodied gold!—and I will take it. So will we all!”

  “All?” I echoed, liking little of what I heard. Was all of Homana desiring to give me over to my enemy for his Solindish gold, my life was forfeit before the task was begun.

  “Aye!” he shouted. “All! And why not? They are demons. Abominations. Beasts!”

  The wind shifted. It threw ice into my face again, but I made no move to rid myself of it. I could not. I could only stare at the man in the snow, struck dumb by his admission.

  And then I looked at Finn.

  Like me, he was quite still. Silent. Staring. But then, slowly, he lifted his head and looked directly at me. I saw the shrinking of his pupils so that the yellow of his eyes stood out like a beacon against the storm. Yellow eyes. Black hair. The gold that hung at his left ear, bared by the wind that blew the hair from his face. His alien, predator’s face.

  I looked at him with new eyes, as I had not looked at him for five years, and realized again what he was. Cheysuli. Shapechanger. A man who took on the form of a wolf at will.

  And the reason for the attack.

  Not me. Not me at all. I was insignificant. The prisoner did not know that my head—delivered to Bellam—would give him more gold than he could imagine. By the gods, he did not even know who I was!

  Another time, I might have laughed at the irony. Been amused by my conceit, that I thought all men knew me and my worth. But here, in this place, my identity was not the issue. Finn’s race was.

  “Because of me,” he said, and that only.

  I nodded. Sickened by the realization, I nodded. What we faced now was more impossible than ever. Not only did we come home to Homana after five years of exile to raise an army and win back my stolen throne, but we had to do it in the face of Homanan prejudice. Shaine’s purge—the Cheysuli call it qu’mahlin—was little more than the petty vengeance of a mad king, and yet it had not ended even with the sundering of his realm.

  They had not come to slay me or even take me prisoner. They had come for Finn, because he was Cheysuli.

  “What did they do to you?” I asked. “The Cheysuli. What did this man do to you?”

  The Homanan stared up at Finn in something akin to astonishment. “He is a shapechanger!”

  “But what did he do to you?” I persisted. “Did he slay your son? Take your croft? Rape your daughter? Beggar your family?”

  “Do not bother,” Finn said. “You cannot straighten an ill-grown tree.”

  “You can chop it down,” I returned. “Chop it down and into pieces and feed it to the fire—” I wanted to say more, but I stopped. I saw his face, with its closed, private expression, and I said nothing more. Finn was not one for sympathy, or even anger expressed on his behalf. Finn fought his own battles.

  And now there was this one.

  “Can he be turned?” I asked. “His need I understand—a desperate man will do desperate things—but his target I will not tolerate. Go into his mind and turn him, and he can go home again.”

  Finn’s right hand came up. It was empty. But I saw the clenching of his fingers, as if he sought to clasp a knife. He was asking for my approval. He was liege man to the Prince of Homana, and he asked to mete out a death.

  “No,” I said. “Not this time. Use your magic instead.”

  The man spasmed against the snow. “Gods, no! No! No sorcery—”

  “Hold him,” I said calmly, as he tried to leap up and run.

  Finn was on him at once, though he did not slay him. He merely held him on his knees, pressing him into the snow, on one knee himself with an arm thrust around the throat and the other gripping the head. One twist and it would be done.

  “Mercy!” the dead man cried. But could I do it, I would leave him alive.

  Finn would not ask again. He accepted my decision. I saw the hand tighten against the Homanan’s head and the look of terror enter the brown eyes. And then they were empty, and I knew Finn had gone in to do as I had ordered.

  It shows in the eyes. I have seen it in the faces and eyes of others Finn has used his magic on. But I also saw it in Finn’s eyes each time: the total immersion of his soul as he sought the gift of compulsion and used it on another. He went away, though his body remained. That which was Finn was elsewhere; he was not-Finn. He was something less and something awesomely more. He was not man, not beast, not god. Something—apart.

  The man wavered and sagged, but he d
id not fall. Finn’s arm remained locked around his throat. The hand was pressed against his skull, but it did not break it. It did not snap the neck. It waited.

  Finn twitched and jerked. The natural sunbronzing of his face was suddenly gone; he was the color of death. All gray and ivory, with emptiness in his eyes. I saw the slackening of his mouth and heard the rasp in his throat. And then, before I could say a word, he broke the man’s neck and threw the body down.

  “Finn!” I was off my horse at once, thrusting my sword blade down into the snow. I left it there, moving toward Finn, and reached out to grab what I could of his leathers and furs. “Finn, I said turn him, not slay him—”

  But Finn was lurching away, staggering in the snow, and I knew he had not heard me. He was not himself. He was still—elsewhere.

  “Finn.” I caught his arm and steadied him. Even beneath the thickness of winter furs I could feel the rigidity in his arm. His color was still bad; his pupils were nothing but specks in a void of perfect yellow. “Finn—”

  He twitched again, and then he was back. He swung his head to look at me, and only then realized I held his arm. At once I released it, knowing he was himself again, but I did not relax my stance. It was only because he was Finn that I had left my sword behind.

  He looked past me to the body in the snow. “Tynstar,” he said. “I touched—Tynstar.”

  I stared. “How?”

  He frowned and pushed a forearm across his brow, as if he sweated. But his face was dusted with snow, and he shivered from the cold. Once, but it gave away his bewilderment and odd vulnerability. “He was—there. Like a web, soft but sticky…and impossible to shed.” He shook himself, like a dog shaking off water.

  “But—if he and the others were hunting Cheysuli and not the Prince of Homana…” I paused a moment. “Would Tynstar meddle in the qu’mahlin?”

  “Tynstar would meddle in anything. He is Ihlini.”

  I nearly smiled. But I did not, because I was thinking about Tynstar. Tynstar called the Ihlini, because he ruled (if that is the proper word) the race of Solindish sorcerers. Much like the Cheysuli were the magical race of Homana, the Ihlini sprung from Solinde. But they were evil and did the bidding of the demons who served the netherworld. There was nothing of good about the Ihlini. They wanted Homana, and had aided Bellam to get her.