The Longest Way Home Read online

  Of course Joseph thought of his father, too, that stern, serious, studious man whom Joseph had never come to know as closely as he would have liked to. He never would, now. One thought led to another and he saw other and more ghostly members of his family standing before him, his mother the Mistress Wireille, who had betrayed them all by dying so young, and then his father’s father, old Master Eirik, who had always seemed so forbidding of mien with his great white beard and jutting nose and tight-clamped scowling lips, but who actually had been the warmest and most kindhearted of men, the ruler of the House for sixty years and beloved by all. Joseph remembered how fond his grandfather had been of telling tales of the Keilloran Masters of times gone by, the whole long line, an earlier Joseph and an earlier Martin and an earlier Eirik, far back into the first days of the Masters of Homeworld, the same names over and over, bold visionary men who had carved out the family domain in the bounteous subtropical Southland and ruled it with wisdom and foresight and justice. Joseph, only a small boy then, had felt an enormous sense of pride at hearing those stories, at knowing that he was descended from that long line of Keillorans, that one day he would sit where they had sat, and would discharge the awesome duties of his post in a way that showed that he was worthy of his inheritance, and would in his turn continue the line by engendering the Masters who would follow him—

  “Easy with him,” someone was saying. “Will break in pieces if you handle him too rough, that one.”

  “No meat on’s bones, none. None. Half dead, he is.”

  “Half and more. Easy, now. Up with him. Up.”

  His mind was still full of thoughts of his grandfather, and of his grandfather’s grandfathers back through time. It seemed to him that one of the voices he was hearing, a deep, gruff one, was his grandfather’s voice, the voice of Eirik Master Keilloran, who had made a special journey to Middle Manza to rescue his errant grandson. Could that be? His grandfather was dead these ten years past, was he not? Perhaps not. Perhaps that was he, right here, now, his father’s father, that wonderful fierce-looking old man. Who would scoop him up, take him in his arms, stride easily from province to province with him until he was home again in Keilloran.

  “Grandfather?” Joseph said. He did not open his eyes. “Is that really you, grandfather?”

  There was no answer. He was not at all sure that he had actually spoken aloud.

  But it definitely was true that he was being lifted, carefully, very carefully, cradled like a dangling cloak across someone’s outstretched arms. The stirring of fresh air around Joseph’s head brought him back a little way into conscious awareness, and he opened his eyes a bit, peering out through slitted lids. There were two men, neither of them his grandfather, though one, the one with the deep, gruff voice, was indeed old and bearded. But his beard was an untidy straggling thing and he was a short, heavy-set man wearing a tight yellow jerkin and loose-fitting trousers that flared at the cuffs, Folkish clothes, and his face, framed by his long unkempt grayish hair, was a pure Folkish face, coarse-featured, heavy-jawed, bulbous-nosed. The other man, the one who was carrying him, looked much younger, and Folkish also. And Folkish was what they were speaking, though it was a strangely slurred Folkish, very nasal, not at all familiar.

  Joseph realized that he himself, when he had cried out a moment ago to his grandfather, would surely have spoken in Master. So if he really had spoken aloud they must know what he was, and thus all of his months of strenuous travail had been in vain. He had been captured by the rebels anyway, and now, he assumed, they were going to put him to death.

  Well, what did that matter? He would not have lived more than another day or two anyhow, even if they had not found him. But if they meant to kill him, why were they going to all the trouble of picking him up and carrying him somewhere? They could finish him off with one quick twist of his skinny neck, the way the noctambulo had killed the mud-crawlers in the Getfen forest.

  Perhaps he had not really said anything out loud, then. So they had no hint of who or what he might be, other than some pathetic starving wretch asleep under a bush, a lost soul in need of help. For the first time since the really serious weakness and dizziness had come over him Joseph felt a faint glimmering hope that he might actually survive a little longer.

  They were both holding him, the older man gripping him by the ankles, the other under his arms, as they swung him upward and gently lowered him into a vehicle of some sort, not an open wagon of the kind he had grown accustomed to during his travels between one Indigene village and the next, but an actual truck. They tucked him in so that he was sitting upright. Joseph leaned back and drew shallow breaths and waited for the next thing to happen.

  “Have a bit of bread, will you?” the older one asked.

  Joseph only nodded. His mind felt so muzzy that he did not want to attempt framing a sentence in Folkish just yet, and he was afraid to answer in Master.

  The other one took Joseph’s hand and pressed something into it: a torn-off chunk of bread, it was, hard, grayish, much the same sort of rough peasant stuff that the Getfen woman—what was her name? Joseph was unable to remember, though he remembered her clearly enough—had given him the night that all this began. Hungry as he was, Joseph stared at it a long while before he put it to his lips. He was not sure that he could get it down. The thought came to him of that old Folkish man he had found cowering in the subcellars of Ludbrek House—Waerna, that was his name, he could at least remember that one—and how, offered food and drink for what perhaps was the first time in many days, the old man had looked at it timidly, afraid to try to eat. Now he was as close to starvation as Waerna had been then, floating in a dreamy half-world where swallowing a bite of bread was, perhaps, an impossible task. He knew he had to try. His two Folkish rescuers were softly urging him, in their odd, slurred Folkish, to have a little. But when Joseph attempted it he was unable to manage even one bite. The bread seemed as hard as stone against the tips of his teeth, and when he touched his tongue to it, purely to feel the flavor of it, disgust rose in him and something squirmed within his gut like a wild animal struggling to break free. Joseph turned his head aside, wincing.

  “Very thirsty,” he said. “Drink—first. Can’t—eat.”

  He said it in Folkish. Did they understand him? Yes. Yes. The older one put a flask to his lips. Water, it was. Joseph drank, cautiously at first, then more deeply. That was better. Once again he attempted the bread, and was able this time to take a tiny bite. He chewed at it unendingly, got it down at last, felt it almost immediately trying to come back up. Somehow he held it down. Had another bite. Another. Better, yes.

  The younger one said, “A bit of meat, now?”

  The mere idea made Joseph feel ill. He shook his head.

  “You wouldn’t be wanting wine just now either, then.”

  “No. No.”

  “They can see after him in town,” the older one said. “We needs be going now.”

  Joseph heard the sound of the truck’s engine starting up. He remembered then the things he had been carrying, his few possessions, his pack, his utility case, the fur mantle that he had brought with him from the Indigene village. He did not want to leave those things behind, forlorn and abandoned under that bush. “Wait,” Joseph said. “There were some things of mine there—my belongings—”

  The younger man grunted something and jumped down from the truck. When he returned, only a few moments later, he was carrying everything with him. With curious delicacy he spread Joseph’s mantle out over his knees, and gave him the other things, not without a puzzled frown as he handed over the utility case. Then the truck started up.

  Joseph realized from the swiftness of the man’s return that his recent resting-place must have been no more than a few yards off the road that they were traveling now. The traffic-sounds that he had heard while lying in his stupor had been no illusions, then. He had managed to make his way nearly back to civilization, or civilization’s edge, anyway, though the last of his energy had left him be
fore he had actually reached it, and he would have died under that bush if these men had not found him. They must have gone off a short way into the underbrush to relieve themselves, Joseph thought, and by that little happenstance alone had his life been saved. If indeed it had been saved. His weakened body might not recover, he knew, from the stresses of his long solitary march. And even if he did regain some measure of health, it was still not at all clear what was going to happen to him now, a fugitive Master who has fallen into the hands of the Folk.

  4

  THEY DROVE FOR WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN HOURS. JOSEPH drifted in and out of consciousness. From time to time he heard one of the men speaking to him, and he answered as well as he could, but it was hard for him to remember, a moment later, what they or he had said. Had they asked him where he was heading? Had he told them? He hoped that they were going south, in any event, and tried to reckon their direction from the position of the sun as he glimpsed it through the truck’s little side window.

  He was not sure at first how to interpret what he saw. The sun seemed to be in front of them as they journeyed down the highway, and that felt wrong, somehow. But then Joseph reminded himself that in this hemisphere the sun was supposed to be in the southern part of the sky. So that was all right. If they were traveling toward the sun, they must be going south. He could see it out of the right-hand window, which meant that this must be afternoon, since the sun moved across the sky from east to west, and west had to be to the right if they were going south. Yes? Yes. His mind felt very clear, icy-cold, and yet it was so very hard to think properly: everything was a terrible effort. I have damaged myself through lack of food, Joseph told himself again. I have made myself stupid, perhaps permanently so. Even if I do get back to House Keilloran eventually I will no longer be qualified to do a Master’s work, and I will have to step aside and let Rickard inherit the House, and how he will hate that! But what else can I do, if I have become too stupid to govern the estate?

  It was a painful thing to consider. He let himself glide into sleep, and did not awaken again until the truck had come to a halt and the two men were lifting him out of it, treating him as they had before, as though he were very fragile, as though any but the gentlest handling might shatter him.

  Joseph could barely stand. He leaned against the younger of his two rescuers, locking his arm inside the man’s, and tried as well as he could to stay upright, but he kept swaying and beginning to topple, and had to be pulled back again and again to a standing position.

  They had reached a village: a Folkish village, Joseph supposed. Its layout was nothing like that of the Indigene villages in which he had lived for so many months. This was no dense, dark warren in the Indigene style, tight rows of conical mud-and-wattle houses crowded together in hivelike fashion around a central plaza of ceremonial buildings with the village’s communal growing-fields beyond. Here Joseph saw scatterings of small squarish wooden buildings with thatched roofs and stubby stone chimneys rising above them, set widely apart, each house with a low picket fence around it and its own pleasant little kitchen-garden in front and what looked like stables for domestic animals to the rear. Untidy grassy strips ran between the villagers’ dwellings. Dusk was beginning to descend. Burning stakes set into the ground provided illumination. To one side ran a canal, spanned here and there by arching wooden bridges. Off the other way there was a big domed building standing by itself that was surmounted by the Folkish holy symbol, the solar disk with rays of sunlight streaming from it, marking it as the village’s house of worship. The closest thing to a main plaza was the expanse of bare, skinned ground where the truck had halted, but this was a mere parking area that could not have had any ceremonial significance. Vehicles of all kinds were scattered about it, wagons and carts and trucks and harvesting-machines.

  His arrival, he saw, was causing a stir. Little groups of curious villagers came out of the houses to inspect him. Most of them hung back, pointing and murmuring, but one, a short, spraddle-legged man with the widest shoulders Joseph had ever seen, scarcely any neck, and a blunt bullet-shaped head, came right up to him and gave him a long moment of intense, piercing scrutiny. “This is Stappin,” whispered the man who was holding him up. “Governor of the town, he is.” And indeed Joseph was readily able to discern the aura of authority, strength, and imperturbable self-confidence that this man radiated. They were traits that he had no difficulty recognizing. His father had them—the Master of any Great House would—and Joseph had seen them in the Ardardin, too, and in some of the other Indigene chieftains along the way. They were necessities of leadership. The aim of Joseph’s entire education had been to enable him to develop those traits in himself.

  “Why, is just a boy!” Stappin said, after studying Joseph for a time. “Looks old, he does. But those are young eyes. —Who are you, boy? What are you doing here?”

  Joseph dared not admit that he was a Master. But he had failed to prepare himself for this moment. He said the first thing that leaped into his mind, hoping that it was the right thing: “I am Waerna of Ludbrek House.”

  There was no reason why they would ever have heard that name all the way down here. But if by some chance they had, and said that they knew Waerna of Ludbrek House and he was an old man, Joseph intended simply to tell them that he was the grandson of the Waerna they knew, and had the same name.

  Stappin did not react to the name or his implied claim of Folkish blood, though. Joseph went on, “When the estate where I lived was destroyed in the rebellion, I fled into the mountains. Now I have no home at all.”

  The words drained the last of his stamina. His knees turned to water and he slumped down, sagging against the man who held him. Everything became unclear to him after that, until he opened his eyes and discovered that he was inside one of the cottages, lying in an actual bed—no piles of furry skins here—with an actual blanket over him and a pillow under his head. A Folkish woman was looking down at him with motherly concern. By the sputtering light of candles set in sconces against the walls Joseph saw four or five other figures in the room, a boy or youngish man, a girl, and several others lost in the shadows.

  The woman said, “Will you take some tea, Waerna?”

  He nodded and sat up. The blanket slipped away, showing him that they had removed his clothes: he saw them now, his filthy Indigene robes, lying in a heap beside the bed. It appeared that they had bathed him, too: his skin had a fresh, cool feeling that it had not had in many days.

  The woman put a mug of warm tea in his hand. Joseph drank it slowly. It was very mild, faintly sweet, easy to swallow. Afterward the woman watched him for a time, to see how well he kept it down. He was managing it. Something was cooking in another room, some soup or stew simmering over a fire, and the smell of it made him a little uneasy, but the tea seemed to have settled his stomach fairly well.

  “Would you like something else to eat?” the woman asked.

  “I think so,” Joseph said. The woman turned and said something to the girl, who went out of the room. Joseph was afraid that she was going to bring him whatever it was they were cooking in there, which he knew he would not be able to deal with, but when she came back a little while later she was bearing two slices of bread on a plate, and a mug of warm milk. She knelt beside the bed to offer them to him, smiling encouragingly. He nibbled at the bread, which was soft and airy, much easier to get down than the hard crust he had been offered in the truck, and took a sip or two of the milk. The girl kept looking at him, still smiling, holding out the plate of bread in case he should feel capable of eating more.

  He liked the way she smiled. It was a pretty smile, he thought. She looked quite pretty herself, as Folkish girls went: her face very broad, as they all tended to be, strong bones, a wide nose, full lips, but her skin was pale and clear and her hair, straight and cropped short, was a soft golden color. So far as he was able to tell she was about his age, or perhaps a year or two older. I must be feeling better already even to be noticing these things, he told himself.
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br />   It troubled him that when he sat up like this the whole upper part of his body was bared to her, and she could see how scrawny he had become. That embarrassed him. He looked like a dead man, a skeleton that somehow still was covered with skin. But then he shivered, and the woman—was she the girl’s mother?—noticed that at once and put a wrap around his shoulders, a woolen thing, coarse and heavy, that felt unpleasantly scratchy against his skin but did at least hide his shrunken arms and hollow chest from view as well as keeping him warm. He took a few more bites of the bread and finished the milk.

  “More?” the woman asked.

  “I think not. Not just yet.”

  They were being very kind to him. Didn’t they suspect, from his slender build and finely formed features and whatever hints of a Master accent in his voice he was unable to conceal, that he was a member of the enemy race? Apparently not. They would know nothing of what a southern Master accent sounded like here, anyway; and as for his long limbs and his tapering nose and his thin lips, well, there had been more than a little interbreeding down through the centuries, and it was not all that uncommon for members of the Folk to show some physical traits of the ruling class. It did seem that they accepted him for what he claimed to be, a young man of their own kind, a refugee from a far-away destroyed House.