The Longest Way Home Read online

  An hour into his morning march Joseph came up over a gentle rise in the land and saw a road cutting through the valley below him, looping down from the northeast and aligning itself with the route that the position of the sun told him he must take. Quite possibly it was the same road that Thayle had left him on, the one that he had abandoned when it seemed to turn eastward. It did at least look similar to that one, rough and narrow and badly in need of maintenance. There was no traffic on it. He had never realized how sparsely populated so much of the northern continent was.

  After only a few days back in the purity of the wild Joseph felt a strange reluctance to set foot again on anything so unnatural as an asphalt highway. But the road did seem to run due south from where he was, and therefore was probably his most direct course toward the Isthmus. There was no harm in following it by day, he thought. He would go off into the bush each evening when it came to be time to settle down for the night.

  It was not pleasing to be walking on a paved surface again, though. The highway felt harsh, even brutal, against his sandaled feet. He was tempted to go take the sandals off and go barefoot on it. I am becoming a creature of nature, he thought, a wild thing, a beast of the fields. My identity as a civilized being is dropping away from me day by day. I have become a shaggy animal. If I ever do get home, will I be able to turn myself back into a Master again? Or will I slip away from House Keilloran when no one is looking, and go off by myself to forage for berries and roots in the wilderness beyond the estate?

  There were traces in this district of former settlement: a scattering of small wooden houses of the sort he had lived in at Eysar Haven, but isolated ones, set one by one at goodly distances from each other at the side of the road. They were the homes of individual Folkish farmers, he supposed, who had not wanted to live in a village, not even a cuyling village. None of them was occupied, though there was no sign of any destruction: apparently their owners had just abandoned them, he could not tell how long ago. Perhaps the war had come this way, or perhaps those who had lived here had just gone away: it was impossible to tell.

  Joseph prowled around in one that had a wire bird-coop alongside the main building, the sort in which thestrins or heysir would have been kept. There was at least the possibility that some remnants of the farmer’s flock might still be in residence there. His supply of meat was nearly at its end and it would be splendid to dine on roast thestrin tonight, or even an omelet of heysir eggs. But Joseph found nothing in the coop except empty nests and a scattering of feathers. Inside the farmhouse itself a thick layer of dust coated everything. The building had been emptied of virtually all it had once contained except for some old, shapeless furniture. Joseph did discover a single incongruous unopened bottle of wine standing at the edge of a kitchen counter. He had nothing with which to open it, and finally simply snapped its neck against the side of the rust-stained sink. The wine was thin and sour and he left most of it unfinished.

  That night a light rain began to fall. Joseph decided to sleep inside the house, but he disliked the confined feeling that sleeping indoors produced in him, and the drifting clouds of dust that he had stirred up were bothersome. He slept on the porch instead, lying on some bedraggled old pillows that he found, listening to the gentle pattering sound of the rain until sleep took him.

  The morning was bright, clear, and warm. He allowed himself a quick, minimal breakfast and set out early, and soon was beyond the last of the abandoned farmhouses. He was moving into a terrain that was neither forest nor meadow, dominated by immense stately trees with steeply upturned branches, each standing in splendid isolation, far from its nearest neighbor, amidst a field of dense, rubbery-looking pink-leaved grass. A myriad of small round-bodied hopping creatures with fluffy grayish fur moved about busily below the trees, probably searching for seeds.

  The sight of them in such a multitude made Joseph, who had begun to see that he would need to restock his food supply in another day or two, feel a burst of sudden hunger. He yearned for a rifle. The best he could hope for, though, was to try to bring one down with a well-aimed rock. But as he crept up on one group of them with what he hoped was something like stealth they melted away before him like winter fog in the bright morning sun, easily and unhurriedly drifting out of his range as Joseph approached them, and resumed their explorations at the far side of the field. A second group did the same. Joseph gave the enterprise up without casting a single stone.

  His mood was cheerful, nevertheless. This was an inviting kind of countryside and he did not doubt that he would find something to eat somewhere, sooner or later, and his body felt so well tuned now, so smoothly coordinated in every function, that there was real joy to be had from striding along down the empty road at a brisk pace. The sun stood high in the sky before him, showing him the way to Helikis. Joseph felt that it did not matter if it took him another whole year to get home, three years, ten years: this was the great adventure of his life, the unexpected epic journey that would shape him forever, and however much time it required would be the span that his destiny had marked out for it to last.

  Then he came around a curve in the road, still moving jauntily along, whistling, thinking pleasant thoughts of his nights with Thayle, and discovered that the road just ahead was full of military-looking vehicles, perhaps half a dozen of them, with a crowd of armed men standing alongside them.

  A roadblock, Joseph realized. A checkpoint of some kind. And he had walked right into it, or nearly so.

  Had they seen him? He could not tell. He halted quickly and turned about, meaning to slip back the way he had come, thinking to hide himself in the woods until they moved along, or, if they didn’t move along, to take up a lateral trail that would get him around them. He succeeded in covering about a dozen paces.

  Then a voice from somewhere above him, a crisp, flat, nasal voice, said in Folkish, “You will stay exactly where you are. You will lift your hands above your head.”

  Joseph looked up. A stocky helmeted man in a drab uniform stood on the hillside overlooking the highway. He had a rifle in his hands, aimed at the middle of Joseph’s chest. Several other men in the same sort of uniform were jogging around the bend in the road toward him. They were armed also.

  Any movement other than one of surrender would be suicidal, Joseph saw. He nodded to the man on the hillside and held up his hands.

  They came up to him and formed a little cluster about him. Rebel soldiers, he supposed, five of them altogether. Not one came up much higher than his shoulders. All five had the same flat broad noses, narrow grayish eyes, yellowish hair that looked as though it had been cut by snipping around the edges of an inverted bowl. They might almost have been five brothers.

  He heard them chattering quickly in Folkish, arguing over him, trying to decide who and what he was. The prevailing belief among them seemed to be that he was a spy, although for whom they thought he might be spying was not something Joseph was able to determine. But one of them thought he was a wandering wild man of the woods, a harmless crazy simpleton. “Only a crazy man would come along this road right now,” he said. “And look how filthy he is. Did you ever see anyone who looked as filthy as this one?” Joseph took some offense at that. It was only a few weeks since he had last trimmed his beard and his hair, and not a great many days had gone by since he had last washed himself, either. He thought he appeared respectable enough, considering his recent circumstances. Yet these soldiers, or the one who had said it, at least, saw him quite differently. This latest sojourn in the wilderness must have left him far more uncouth-looking than he suspected.

  He said nothing to them. That seemed the wisest policy. And they made no attempt whatever to interrogate him. Perhaps at their level of authority they had no responsibility for questioning prisoners. Instead they merely bundled him unceremoniously into one of the vehicles parked by the side of the road and headed off with him toward the south.

  A sprawling encampment lay ten minutes down the road: wire-mesh walls encircling dozens of fli
msy-looking, hastily flung-up huts, with scores of Folkish soldiers wearing the rebel uniform moving around busily within it. At the gate Joseph’s five warders surrendered him, with a muttered explanation that Joseph could not hear, to two others who seemed to be officers of a higher rank, and they gestured to Joseph to follow him within.

  Silently, he obeyed. Any kind of resistance or even a show of reluctance to cooperate was likely to prove foolhardy. They conveyed him down an inner avenue between rows of the little huts and delivered him to one of the larger buildings, which, Joseph saw, was provided with an attached and fenced-in yard of considerable size: a compound for prisoners, he supposed. Wordlessly they directed him within.

  It was a long windowless structure, a kind of dormitory, dark inside except for a few feeble lamps. The air inside was stale-smelling and stifling. Simple iron-framed cots were arranged along the walls. Most were empty, though half a dozen were occupied by Folk, all of them men, most of them sitting slumped on the edges of their cots staring off into nothingness. Joseph saw no one among them who might have been a Master. A door on the right led to the fenced-in outside area.

  “This will be yours,” said one of his guards, indicating an empty cot. Wordlessly he held out his hand for Joseph’s pack, and Joseph surrendered it without offering objection, though he bitterly regretted being parted from his utility case and everything else that had accompanied him through all these many months of wandering. He owned so little that he could carry it all in that single pack, and now they were taking it away from him. The officer sniffed at the pack and made a face: the last of the wrapped meat was within, probably beginning to go bad. “They will come to speak with you in a little while,” the guard said, and both men turned and went out, taking the pack with them.

  Not a single one of the slump-shouldered Folkish men sitting on the cots looked in his direction. They seemed as incurious about him as the cots themselves. Joseph wondered how long it was that they had been interned here, and what had been done to them during their stay.

  After a little while he went out into the adjoining yard. It was a huge, barren, dreary place, nothing but bare dusty sun-baked ground, not even a blade of grass. At the far end Joseph saw what looked like a brick-walled washhouse and a latrine. There were some more Folkish men in the yard, each one keeping off by himself in a little zone of isolation, holding himself apart from any of the others, immobile, looking at nothing, almost as though he was unaware that anyone else was with him out there. All of them stood in a manner that gave them the same odd slumped, defeated look as the men on the cots inside. Joseph was surprised to see three Indigenes also, a little silent group huddled together in one corner. He wondered how this incomprehensible civil war could have managed to involve Indigenes. He understood nothing. But he had been on his own for more than a year, he calculated: from mid-summer in High Manza to late summer, or even early autumn, wherever he was now. A great deal must have happened in all that time, and no one here was going to explain it to him.

  There seemed to be no harm in trying to find out, though. He went up to the nearest of the Folkers, who paid no more attention to the approaching Joseph than a blind man would, and said softly, “Pardon me, but—”

  The man glared at Joseph for an instant, only an instant, a quick, hot, furious glare. Then he turned away.

  “I’m sorry,” Joseph said bewilderedly. It did not seem at all remarkable to him just then to be apologizing to a Folker. “I’m new here. I only wanted to ask you a few things about—”

  The man shook his head. He seemed both angry and frightened. He moved away.

  Joseph got the same reaction from the next two men that he tried. And when he went toward the trio of Indigenes, they drifted silently away from him the way those little hopping creatures in the field had. He gave the project up at that point. It is not the done thing here, Joseph realized, to have conversations with your fellow inmates. Perhaps conversation was prohibited; perhaps it was just risky. You never knew who might be a spy. But again he wondered: spying for whom? For whom?

  Noon came and went. In early afternoon three Folkish orderlies arrived with food for the prisoners’ meals, carrying it in big metal tubs slung between two sticks: cold gluey gruel, some sort of stewed unidentifiable meat that had the flavor of old cardboard, hard musty bread that was mostly crust. The inmates lined up and sparse portions were ladled out to them on tin plates. They were given wooden spoons to use. Hungry as he was, Joseph found it hard to eat very much. He forced himself.

  The hours went by. The sun was strong, the air humid. He saw armed sentries marching about outside the wire-mesh fence. Within the compound no one spoke a word to anyone else. At sundown one of the guards blew a whistle and everyone who was in the yard went shuffling inside, each to his own cot. Joseph had forgotten which cot was his: he picked one at random in a row of empty ones, half hoping that someone else would challenge his taking of it so that he could at least hear the sound of a human voice again, but no one raised any objection to his choice. He sprawled out on it for a while; then, not finding it comfortable to lie on the thin, hard mattress, he sat up like the others, slumped on the edge of his cot. When it was dark the orderlies returned with another meal, which turned out to be the same things as in the earlier one only in smaller portions. Joseph could not bring himself to eat very much of it. He hardly slept at all.

  The second day went by very much like the first. The food was, if anything, just a little worse, and there was even less of it. The silence in the yard grew so intense that it began to resound within Joseph’s head like a trumpet-call. For hour after hour he paced along the fenced border of the compound, measuring off its dimensions in footsteps. He envisioned his spending the next thirty years, or the next fifty, doing nothing but that. But of course he would not last fifty years on the sort of food that they served the prisoners here.

  The question is, Joseph thought, will I starve to death before I go insane, or afterward?

  It seemed foolish even to think of attempting to escape. And trying to stand upon his rights as a Master was an even sillier idea. He had no rights as a Master, certainly not here, perhaps not anywhere any more. More likely than not they would kill him outright if they found out who he really was. Better to be thought to be a vagabond lunatic, he thought, than the scion of one of the Great Houses of Helikis. But why was he here? What was the point of rounding up vagabond lunatics? Did they mean simply to intern their prisoners purely for the sake of interning them, so that they would not intrude on whatever military action might be going on in this part of the world? Why not just shoot us, then? he wondered. Perhaps they would; perhaps they were merely waiting for the order to come from some other camp. Joseph began to think he might almost prefer to be shot to having to spend an indefinite length of time here.

  But on the third morning a guard entered the compound and indicated, in the curt wordless way that seemed to be the usual way of communicating with prisoners in this place, that Joseph was to follow him.

  The guard marched him up the middle of the camp, turned left down an aisle of important-looking structures that were guarded by strutting sentries and appeared more solidly constructed than those Joseph had seen so far, and delivered him to a smallish building at the end of the row.

  A Folkish officer with an air of great confidence and power about him that reminded Joseph of Governor Stappin of Eysar Haven was sitting behind a desk that had the contents of Joseph’s pack spread out on it: his utility case, his books, his flask, and all the rest. His shoulders were immensely broad, even as Folkish shoulders went, and he had his shirt open to the waist in the muggy heat, revealing a dense, curling thatch of reddish-gold hair. The hair of the officer’s head was of the same color and curling texture, but it was receding badly, laying bare the great shining dome of his forehead.

  “Well,” he said, glancing from Joseph to the assortment of objects on his desk, and then to Joseph again. “These things are very interesting. Where did you get them?”


  “They were given to me,” said Joseph.

  “By whom?”

  “Different people. It’s hard to remember. I’ve been traveling so long.”

  “Traveling from where?”

  “From the north,” Joseph said. He hesitated a moment. “From High Manza,” he added.

  The officer’s gaze rested coldly on Joseph. “From where in High Manza, exactly?”

  “A place called Getfen House, it was.” It was Joseph’s intention to tell as few lies as possible, while revealing as little as he could that might be incriminating.

  “You came from a Great House?”

  “I was there just a little while. I was not a part of House Getfen at all.”

  “I see.” The officer played with the things on the desk, inattentively fondling Joseph’s torch, his cutting-tool, his book-reader. Joseph hated that, that this man should be touching his beloved things. “And what is your name?” the officer asked, after a time.

  “Joseph,” Joseph said. He did not add his title or his surname. It would not do to try to masquerade as Waerna of Ludbrek House any longer, for that had not worked particularly well at Eysar Haven and was unlikely to do any better for him here, and he preferred to use his real name rather than to try to invent anything else. They would not necessarily recognize “Joseph” as a Master name, he thought, not if he held back “Master” and “Keilloran” from them.