Read Online The Song of Homana by Jennifer Roberson - Free Book Online Page B

other. Lachlan and I rode through the main gate into Mujhara, and at once I knew I was home.
    Save I was not. My home was filled with Solindish soldiers, hung about with ringmail and boiled leather and glinting silver swords. They let us in because they knew no better, thinking Homana’s rightful lord would never ride so willingly into his prison.
    I heard the Solindish tongue spoken in the streets of Mujhara more than I heard Homanan. Lachlan and I spoke Ellasian merely to be safe. But I thought I could say anything and be unacknowledged; Bellam’s soldiers were bored. After five years and no threat from without, they lived lazily within.
    The magnificence was gone. I thought perhaps it was my own lack of discernment, having spent so long in foreign lands, but it was not. The city, once so proud, had lost interest in itself. It housed a Mujhar who had stolen his throne, and the Homanans did not care to praise his name. Why should they praise his city? Where once the windows had glittered with glass or glowed with horn, now the eyes were dark and dim, smoked over, puttied atcorners with dirt and grime. The white-washed walls were dingy and gray, some fouled with streaks of urine. The cobbled streets had crumbled, decayed until the stench hung over it like a miasma. I did not doubt Homana-Mujhar remained fit for a king, but the rest of the city did not.
    Lachlan looked at me once, then again. “Look not so angry, or they will know.”
    “I am sick,” I said curtly. “I could vomit on this vileness. What have they done to my city?”
    Lachlan shook his head. “What defeated people do everywhere: they live. They go on. You cannot blame them for it. The heart has gone out of their lives. Bellam exacts overharsh taxes so no one can afford to eat, let alone wash their houses. And the streets? Why clean dung when the great ass sits upon the throne?”
    I glanced at him sharply. He did not speak as Bellam’s man, saying what he should to win my regard. He spoke like a man who understood the reasons for Mujhara’s condition—disliking it, perhaps, as much as I, but tolerating it better. Perhaps it was because he was Ellasian, and a harper, with no throne to make his own.
    “I am sorry you must see it this way,” I told him with feeling. “When
I
—” I broke it off at once. What good lies in predicting something that may not happen?
    Lachlan gestured. “Here, a tavern. Shall we go in? Perhaps here we will find better fortune than we found at the village taverns.”
    We had better. Failure rankled, though I understood it. It is difficult to ask poor crofters to give up what little they have to answer the call of an outlawed prince. It was soldiers I needed first, and then what other men I could find.
    I stared at the tavern grimly. It looked like all the others: gray and dingy and dim. And then I looked at Lachlan.
    He smiled, but it lacked all humor, a hooking down of his mouth. “Of course. We will go on to another…one you will choose for yourself.”
    I jumped off my horse, swore when I slipped in somemuck, and scraped my boot against a loosened cobble. “This will do well enough. Come in, and bring your harp.”
    Lachlan went in before me when he had taken his Lady from his saddle. I paused to let him enter alone, then went in behind him, shoving open the narrow, studded door.
    At once I ducked. The beamwork of the dark roof was low, so low it made me wince against its closeness. The floor beneath my feet was earthen, packed, but bits of it had been scraped into ridges and little piles of dirt, as if the benches and tables had been dragged across it to rest in different places. I put up a hand to tear away the sticky webbing that looped down from the beam beside my head. It clung to my fingers until I scrubbed it off against the cracked, hardened leather of my jerkin.
    A single lantern depended from a hook set into the central beam, painted black with pitch. It shed dim light over the common room. A few candles