The Longest Way Home

3

Once more he rode in a wagon drawn by a team of dull-eyed yaramirs, and once more Ulvas traveled with him, along with two other Indigenes whose names were Casqui and Paca. Joseph had no idea of the route he would be traveling now. There did not seem to be any word in Indigene for “map,” and the Ardardin had not offered him much verbal information about the location of the next Indigene village.

The first part of the journey took him along the same slow, winding road, cobblestoned and narrow, that they had used in the trip to Ludbrek House. An old Indigene road, no doubt. Very old. Five thousand years? Ten thousand, even? It was suitable only for clumsy creaking wagons like this. In all the centuries and tens of centuries since this road had been built, probably nothing in it had been changed but for the replacement of a loose cobble every once in a while. It was just a quiet country road; the Indigenes had never seen any reason to transform it into a major highway.

It occurred to him that for the Indigenes time must seem to stand virtually still. They looked at everything under the auspices of eternity, the invisible sky, the hidden gods. Their gods were not much interested in change, and therefore neither were they. They made even a sleepy people like the Folk seem ferociously energetic. And the Folk themselves, he thought grimly, were not behaving all that sleepily these days.

As on his previous journey, a cool southern wind was blowing, stronger than it had been before and moist now, an unmistakable token of the coming rainy season that was still somewhere to the south of them but already sending its harbingers north. It never seemed to let up. Joseph turned sideways in the wagon to avoid its unending direct thrust.

The second day of plodding travel found them still moving along the road that led toward Ludbrek House. Joseph hoped they were not going to take him back there. He had no desire to see that sad ravaged place again. But that afternoon a second road appeared to their left, a road just as humble as the one they had been on, and the wagondriver Casqui swung the vehicle onto it with a couple of sharp syllables to the yaramirs.

Though their direction was easterly now rather than southerly, the countryside had not changed much. It was the same flat farmland as before, broken only by gently rolling meadows and, farther away, the purple humps of modest hills.

In late afternoon a big modern highway came into sight in the distance. It ran from north to south and thus lay squarely athwart their route. “Get under the furs,” Ulvas told him. “Sometimes now they check the wagons that go by.”

“Who does?” Joseph asked. “Masters, or Folk?”

Ulvas made the crossed-arms gesture, the Indigene shrug. “Whoever might be checking things that day. It does not matter, does it?”

The Indigene road, Joseph saw, ran right up to the great highway that the Masters had designed and the Folk had constructed. It halted at the edge of the highway and, he assumed, resumed on the other side. The broad smooth road was like a wall cutting across the land, marking a place where the native culture of this world and the culture of the Masters met. What had the Indigenes thought when these highways began sprouting on their land? Nothing at all, replied Joseph to his own question. Nothing at all. The highways meant nothing to them; the Masters meant nothing to them; this world itself meant nothing to them. This world was only a film lying over the invisible world that was true reality.

Trucks, big trucks newly repainted in drab military-looking colors, were moving at a brisk pace in both directions on the highway. Rebel trucks, most likely. There were not enough Masters in this whole continent to staff a real army. The much more numerous Folk seemed to have conjured one up and equipped it with all the industrial and commercial vehicles in Manza, though. Just as he had on his first day in the Getfen forest, Joseph trembled at the thought that the rebels—the Folk, the supposedly obtuse and doltish Folk—had been able very quietly to plan this formidable insurrection and put it into operation while the vastly superior intellects of the dominant Masters had somehow failed to detect that anything unusual was going on. And he wondered for what grim purpose it was that this roaring convoy of trucks was heading across the land.

An overpass spanned the highway here to handle cross-traffic like this Indigene wagon. Joseph nestled down beneath the thick stack of sour-smelling furs in the back of the wagon, and Ulvas tucked them around him to hide him from view. He would not have thought a pile of furs could have so much weight. They pressed down hard against him, and the one nearest to his face was jammed against his mouth and nostrils so closely that he gagged at the stale leathery odor of its underside. Getting sufficient air to breathe was no simple trick, either. He wondered how long the highway crossing was going to take. Another minute or two and he would have no choice but to stick his head out for a gulp of air, and it would be unfortunate to find himself staring at a rebel crossing-guard when he did.

But the wagon quickly descended the sloping overpass, and on the far side, once it was toiling away on the cobblestones of the Indigene road again, Ulvas pulled the furs from him. None too soon it was, either. Joseph was just about at the point of nausea.

“How much longer to the village?” he asked.

“Soon. Soon.”

That could mean anything: an hour, a day, a month. Twilight was coming on. He saw lights in the distance, and hoped they were the lights of the village; but then, in another few moments, he was dismayed to realize that what he was seeing were the lights of more trucks moving along yet another highway.

How could they have come to another highway so soon, though? This one was just as big as the last, and, like the last one, ran at right angles to their own route. In this thinly populated countryside there was no reason to build two such highways running on parallel courses such a short distance apart.

Nor had any such thing been done, Joseph realized moments later. The markings told him that this was the same highway as before, that the Indigene road must have gone wandering around this way and that and now was crossing the highway for a second time, in some other place. He could see from the deepening darkness to his right that they had returned to a southerly route. Once again Ulvas hastened to pull the stack of hides over him.

But this time there was a checkpoint of some sort at the approach to the overpass. The wagon came to a halt; Joseph heard muffled voices somewhere above him, discussing something in a language that sounded like a mixture of Folkish and Indigene, though through the pile of furs he could not make out more than an occasional individual word; and then came the unmistakable sound of booted feet very close by. They were inspecting the wagon, it seemed. Yes. Yes.

Why, he wondered, would anyone, rebel or Master, feel the need to search an Indigene wagon? Certainly anyone who had much knowledge of Indigenes would have little reason to think that the aloof, indifferent Indigenes would get so involved in human affairs as to be transporting anything that might be of interest to one set of combatants or the other.

Joseph lay absolutely motionless. He debated trying to hold his breath to keep from giving his presence away, and decided that that was a bad idea, that it would lead inevitably to the need to suck air into his lungs, which might reveal his presence under here, or else to make him cough, which certainly would. It seemed wiser to take very small, shallow breaths, just enough to keep himself supplied with oxygen. The horrible reek of the furs was another problem: he fought against the nausea, gagging. He bit down hard on his lip and tried not to notice the smell.

Someone was thumping around out there, poking this, checking that.

What if they pulled the hides off and found him lying there? How long would it take for them to identify him as a fugitive Master, and what was likely to happen to a Master, even one from the other continent, who fell into rebel hands?

But the thumping stopped. The voices faded. The wagon began to roll once more.

What seemed like ten years went by before Ulvas pulled the furs off him again. Night had fallen. Stars were glistening everywhere. Two moons were in the sky, the little ones, Mebriel and Keviel. He heard the sounds of the busy highway, growing faint now, somewhere behind him.

“What happened?” Joseph asked. “What did they want? Were they looking for refugees?”

“They were looking for wine,” Ulvas told him. “They thought we might be carrying that as our cargo and they wanted some. The nights are becoming long this time of year and the soldiers at the checkpoints become bored.”

“Wine,” Joseph said. “Wine!” A flood of relief came over him and he broke into laughter.

The wagon continued onward until the highway sounds could no longer be heard. Then they halted and camped for the night, and one of the wagondrivers prepared a meal for them. Afterward Joseph tried to sleep, but he was too keyed up to manage it, and eventually he abandoned the attempt.

For hours he lay staring upward, studying the stars. It was a clear night, the constellations sharply delineated. He picked out the Hammer, the Whirlwind, the Mountain, the Axe. There was the Goddess plainly visible, her long flowing hair, her breasts, her broad dazzling hips, the bright triangle of stars that marked her loins. Joseph remembered the night his father first had showed her to him, the naked woman in the sky. It is something a man likes to show his son when his son reaches a certain age, his father had said. Joseph had been twelve, then. He had seen real naked women since then, once in a while, not often and usually not at very close range. They always were fascinating sights, although for him they could not begin to equal the voluptuousness of the starry goddess overhead, whose magnificent overflowing body spanned so many parsecs of the sky.

He wondered whether he would ever hold a woman in his arms, whether he would ever do with her the things that men did with women.

Certainly the opportunity for that had been there for him already if he had wanted it. None of the Folkish girls of the House would have dared refuse a young Master. But Joseph had not wanted to do it with a girl of the Folk. It would be too easy. There seemed something wrong about it, something cheap and brutal and cruel. Besides, it was said that all the Folkish girls began to make love when they were eleven or twelve, and thus he would be matching his innocence against some girl’s vast experience, which might lead to embarrassment for him and perhaps even for her. As for girls of his own kind, no doubt there had been plenty of those around the estate too who would have been willing, certain flirtatious friends of his sister’s, or Anceph’s pretty daughter, or the long-legged red-haired one, Balbus’s niece. And at Getfen House he knew he had entertained fantasies of embracing Kesti, although he knew the dangers that could come from an attempt by the son of the Master of one Great House to enter into a casual affair with the daughter of the Master of another.

He did not want a casual affair, anyway. He was not sure what he did want. Some sort of fastidiousness within him had held him back from doing anything with any girl. There would always be plenty of time for that, he had thought.

Now he could no longer be sure of any such thing. He might have died this very night, if the rebel officer searching the wagon for Indigene wine had found a hidden Master instead.

He lay looking straight up at the Goddess, and imagined himself reaching into the sky and putting his hands over her breasts. The thought brought a smile to his lips. And then the third moon moved into view, big ruddy Sanivark, and the Goddess could no longer be seen. Joseph dozed then, and soon morning came, and they made a quick breakfast of dried meat and berries and moved along.

The landscape began to change. There were no longer any farms here, just broad fields of scrubby second-growth trees, and plateaus thick with rank sedge and clumps of briar. The soil looked bad, dry and pebbly, cut again and again by deep ravines that displayed white and red striations, layers of sand, layers of clay.

Then the land began to improve again and on the third day they came at last to the Indigene village that was their destination. It was laid out much like the village where Joseph had been living before, tall conical buildings made from mud that had been thickly but irregularly plastered over a framework of interlaced laths and twigs, all of them set cheek by jowl in tight curving rows surrounding a central plaza that contained ceremonial buildings, with an agricultural zone forming a ring around the entire settlement. The layout was so similar to that of the previous village that Joseph half expected the Ardardin to come out and greet him here. But in place of a single chieftain this village seemed to have a triumvirate of rulers: at least, three dignified-looking older Indigenes, each of them clad in the same sort of painted leather cape and seashell-decorated leather skirt that the Ardardin had worn, presented themselves as Joseph was getting down from the wagon, and stood in aloof, somber silence, watching his arrival in a kind of bleak attentiveness, saying not a word.

The other villagers were considerably more demonstrative. Dozens of them, children and adults both, came running forward to swarm around Joseph. There was an endearing innocence to this unexpected enthusiasm. They pressed up close against him, narrow tubular heads butting at him like hammers, boldly bringing their faces within inches of his own, nose to nose. Their throat-pouches fluttered and swelled in flurries of spasmodic agitation. A few of the most courageous hesitantly put their hands for a moment or two to the dangling strips of his ragged clothing and lightly pulled at them, as though they found them amusing. As they encircled him they murmured excitedly to one another, but what they said was too indistinctly enunciated and too thickly colloquial for Joseph to be able to comprehend more than the occasional word.

One of them, carrying a little bag of woven cloth that contained a glossy black powder, solemnly poured some into the palm of its hand, dipped the tips of two long pliant fingers into it, and slowly and carefully rubbed a circle of the stuff onto each of Joseph’s cheeks. Joseph tolerated this patiently. He noticed now that the faces of most of the others were similarly adorned with patterns done in the black pigment, not just circles but in some cases whorls, triangles, crosses.

Ulvas, meanwhile, had entered into a conversation with a villager of substantial size and presence who, from the looks of things, was an important minister in the government of the triumvirs, though it was not clad in any of the symbols of authority itself. Joseph could not hear what they were saying, but it began gradually to become clear to him that what was taking place was not so much a conversation as a negotiation; Ulvas was the seller, the big villager was the prospective purchaser, and the primary topic of the conversation was the price that would have to be paid.

As for the commodity being sold, that, Joseph swiftly realized, was himself.

He was not meant to be a party to the transaction. The entire interchange was being carried on in low tones and quickly exchanged phrases, most of them words that were unfamiliar to him and all of it so rapid and cryptic that Joseph had no hope of following it. A good deal of the process was purely gestural. After each set of offers and replies the villager would go across to the triumvirate and report the details. This led to further palaver among the four of them, after which a signal would be given by one of the ruling three, and humbler citizens of the village came forth bearing merchandise: furs, beaded necklaces, bowls containing dried seeds and berries. Ulvas appeared to dismiss each offer as insufficient. New negotiations ensued, leading to new discussions between the rulers and their minister, and even more goods would be brought out: molded balls of vegetable meal, a brown bundle of dried meat, the blanched skull of some horned beast of the forest.

Ulvas was holding out for a steep price, it seemed. At one point there appeared to be a total breakdown of the dealings, huffy turning of backs, foreheads touched with splayed fingers in the emphatic gesture that meant negation. But perhaps all that was a signal of a climax in the negotiations, not a collapse; for almost immediately afterward came apparently conciliatory postures, signs of agreement, a series of new gestures clearly indicating that a deal had been struck. That seemed to be the case. Ulvas, Casqui and Paca began loading the wagon with the things that stood stacked all about in the center of the plaza.

The big minister signalled to Joseph in an unmistakable way. He belonged to them, now.

And now he knew just how little altruism, if indeed there had been any at all, there was in the Ardardin’s decision to pass him along to this neighboring village. The Ardardin had correctly seen that Joseph would be leaving its village as soon as he could; there was need of Joseph’s medical services at other Indigene villages along the route south; no doubt it had seemed merely efficient, rather than in any way morally virtuous, to provide a wagon to take Joseph on his way and simultaneously to turn a nice profit by selling him to the next village in the chain instead of just bestowing him upon them.

Ulvas and Casqui and Paca departed without a word to him. But Joseph had already learned not to expect sentimental leavetakings from these people.

His new hosts—his owners , Joseph corrected himself—showed him to his dwelling-place, a room much smaller than the one he had had before, and even more musty and dimly lit, with only a couple of tatty-looking fur rugs for his bed. On the other hand they had set out a generous meal for him, two bowls of their milky wine, an assortment of berries, stewed meats, and cooked grain, and a tray of knobby greenish-purple fruits of a kind he had never seen before. They were sour and tangy, not unpleasant, although after eating a couple he observed that the thick red juice of them had left his tongue puckered and the entire interior of his mouth very dry. He let the rest of them go untouched.

This settlement, too, had a backlog of medical tasks awaiting his attention in an infirmary set a little way apart from the village core. There were the usual sprained limbs and minor infections, which Joseph dealt with in the ways that had by now become familiar to him. One case, though, was more complicated. There had been a hunting accident, it seemed—the only other explanation, which he found too implausible to consider, was that one Indigene had actually attacked another—and the patient, a young male, had a small projectile point embedded in the upper right side of his back. Apparently this had happened some time ago, for the wound, though infected, had partly healed. No attempt had been made to extract the point. Joseph wondered how deep it was. The patient was in obvious distress: weak, feverish, barely coherent when Joseph questioned him. Joseph held his hand lightly over the wound and felt an insistent pounding throb beneath, as of something in there that must be let out.

Very well, he thought. I will operate.

Joseph had come to accept his own medical masquerade so thoroughly that he felt no compunction about taking this project on. The man lying before him must already be in great discomfort, which would only increase if nothing were done, and finally the infection would spread to some vital zone and cost him his life. Joseph asked for and received the assistance of the village’s master of herbal remedies, who at Joseph’s direction administered a steep dose of the pain-deadening drug to Joseph’s patient. He laid out his pitiful little collection of medical instruments, and cleansed the wound with a piece of cloth dipped in wine, which he hoped would have some antiseptic properties, and gently parted the healed section of the opening so that he could insert the tip of his knifeblade as a probe.

The patient did not seem to complain as Joseph ventured into the golden interior tissues. He wondered how deeply he dared to go; but the essential thing was to seem confident and composed, and that was surprisingly easy for him to achieve. Perhaps in these weeks among the Indigenes he had begun to acquire some form of their overriding indifference to the trivial realities of the visible world. Under the pressure of his blade blood had begun freely to flow, scarlet blood with emerald highlights. The blood is only an illusion, Joseph told himself. The knife I use is an illusion also. Whatever pain the patient may be feeling is illusory. The weapon-point that I’m seeking is another illusion.

His hand was steady. His conscience remained clear.

He touched something hard within. Was it the point, or was it a bone? He wiggled the knifeblade and thought he felt motion against its tip. A bone would not move, he thought. It must be the weapon-point. Coolly he widened the opening. A hint of something dark inside there, was it? He washed away the blood and took a close look. The point, yes. Deep in the meat of the Indigene’s back.

Now came the hard part, for him, for his patient. He beckoned to two of the Indigene onlookers.

“Hold him down,” Joseph said, using the grammatical mode of a direct command, not a supplication. He was the most important person in this room, right now. He did not need to beg for the assistance that was required. “You, put your hand here, and you, hold him over here. Don’t let him move.”

There was no kindly way to do this. He inserted the blade, listened for the little scraping sound as it made contact with the hidden point within, made a twisting motion with his wrist, brought the tip of the blade upward, involuntarily biting his lip as he did so. A great shudder went through the Indigene, who lay face down on the pile of rugs before him. The two villagers who were holding him did not waver.

“There it is,” Joseph said, as the head of the point came into view.

He eased it farther upward, bringing it out of the Indigene’s flesh with one smooth motion, and caught it for a moment in his hand, showing it around exultantly to his audience. Then he tossed it aside. Blood was flowing more heavily now than before. Covering the wound with his hand, he watched quizzically as it welled up between his fingers. He stanched, laved, stanched again. The flow began to slacken. Was it safe to close the incision at this point? He held the sides of the wound together, contemplated them, nodded thoughtfully, just as someone who really knew what he was doing might do.

“Hand that to me,” Joseph said, indicating the little machine from his utility case that served to stitch wounds. He was still not entirely certain how to operate it, but he had enough of a rough idea to make the attempt worthwhile.

Three stitches seemed to do the job.

He prescribed rest for the patient, and the pain-killing drug, and then, an inspired thought, some wine also. The Indigenes were passing the extracted weapon-point from hand to hand around the room. They were staring at him with what certainly must be looks of awe. Joseph wondered, as he had before, whether this time he might not have played the role too well; he wanted these people to move him along to the next village along his route south, after all, not lay claim to him as a permanent village treasure. But once again he had misjudged the way their minds worked. They kept him only until he had had the opportunity to examine every sick person in the village; and then, two or three weeks later, when he had set things to rights as much as possible, they let him know that the time had come for him to be sent onward.

He was not going to miss this place. Joseph had made a point of introducing himself by name to the chief minister and the herbalist and several others, but they had absorbed the information with no evident show of interest, and during his entire stay in the village no one had ever called him by name. He had no relationship there similar to the one he had had with the Ardardin, or even with Ulvas. It was strangely depersonalizing. He felt as though he had no existence for these people other than as a pair of skilled hands. But he saw a reason for that: he had come to the first village as a refugee, and they had taken him in the way they would take in a guest. But here he had been purchased. He was considered mere property. At best a slave, perhaps.

The route to the next village took Joseph through a district of abandoned farms. There were no indications of any Great House in the vicinity; this seemed to be one of the regions, common also in Helikis, where the Masters were absentee landlords and the farms were operated in their name by bailiffs who were themselves of Folkish blood. But the Folk who farmed here must have been loyalists, for the destruction that had been worked was complete, the rebels striking against their own kind with the vindictiveness and vehemence that elsewhere they had reserved for the Masters. Joseph saw the same sort of ruination he had looked upon at Ludbrek House, a sorry wasteland of burned houses, wrecked carts, dead animals, drowned fields. Seven such farms lay along one fifteen-mile stretch of road, all of them shattered in the same fashion. There was no sign of life anywhere.

It rained for the first time that season on the day they passed the last of the dead farms. The three Indigenes who were transporting him took no notice whatever as it started. They said nothing, they made no attempt to cover themselves. But Joseph, riding unprotected in the back of the open wagon, was caught by surprise when the sky, which had been an iron gray for days, turned black and then silver and abruptly began pelting him with cold, hard, fierce rain. He was drenched almost before he knew what was happening. He managed to improvise a little shelter for himself out of some of the many fur mats that were lying about in the wagon and a few of the sticks that were there also, but it was a flimsy construction that did very little to keep the rain out, and he was soaked already anyway.

There was no letup in the rain all day, or on the one that followed. Joseph knew that rain in the eastern half of the northern continent was a highly seasonal thing, a dry season followed by a wet one, with the annual rains beginning in the south and working their way north to High Manza, but he had imagined the change from one to the other would be more gradual. This was like the tipping of a bucket over lands that had been parched for months, a vast bucket whose contents were infinite, inexhaustible. He had never felt so cold and wet in his life. He had not known that such discomfort was possible.

At first the rain disappeared into the ground as soon as it struck. But by the second day the land, which in these parts was coarse sandy gray stuff that had looked as if it had not felt rain for centuries, had been saturated by the downpour, was glutted by it, ceasing now to absorb it. Freshets and rivulets were beginning to make their way along the old dry watercourses that ran in multitudinous furrows across the sloping plains. Already little ponds were forming. Another few days of this, Joseph thought, and there would be lakes and rivers.

He wondered how the mud-and-wattle buildings that the Indigenes of this territory favored could stand up to such an onslaught. Rainfall like this ought to send them sluicing away. But they were hardly likely to build with such stuff if it came apart under the impact of the first rain, and indeed the village toward which they had been traveling, another one of conical towers crowded tightly together around a central plaza, was sloughing off the watery bombardment as easily as though its buildings were made of steel and concrete. They must add something to the mud to make it water-resistant, Joseph thought. The juice of one of their herbs, maybe. The entire science of these people appeared to be constructed out of a knowledge of the chemical properties of the plant life that grew about them. They had no physics, no astronomy, no technology, no real medicine other than the use of potions. But they could build houses out of twigs and mud that would stay intact in diabolical rainfall like this.

News of Joseph’s healing powers had preceded him here. The villagers seemed prepared to pay a heavy bounty for him, for they had filled one entire room of a building on the plaza with treasures to offer: not just the usual fur mats and beaded necklaces, but great branches of blue coral from the eastern sea, and pouches of polished turquoise stones, and the vivid blue-and-red feathers of birds of some tropic land far away, and a great deal more. Even so, the negotiations went on for an extraordinarily long time, and they did not seem to be going smoothly. Though they were conducted, as before, mostly with gestures, aided by quick spurts of conversation in what seemed to be a commercial patois using words unknown to Joseph, he could tell by the tone of voice and the looks of unmistakable exasperation that no meeting of minds was occurring. Huddling soaked and miserable while his soon-to-be former owners, Indigenes whose names he had never learned, bargained with these new Indigenes who sought possession of him over the price of his services, Joseph thought at one point that his current masters had found even this enormous pile of goods inadequate. It looked very much as though they were going to break off the discussion and set out for some village other than this before he had even had a chance to get dry.

Well, if they did, so be it, as long as the village that they would be taking him to was one that brought him closer to his home. But what if—it was his old, constant fear—they simply hauled him back to their own town and kept him as a permanent fixture there?

That did not happen. As abruptly as the dry season had given way to the rain, the contending hagglers reached an agreement and Joseph’s transfer was consummated. Staggering under mats and necklaces and coral branches and all the rest, his sellers went off in the rain to their wagon and his buyers crowded round him for what was becoming the familiar tribal welcome.

These people wanted Joseph not only to heal their sick but to bring holy blessings to the food supplies that they had stored away during the harvest season. In a kind of weird pantomime they led him to their granaries and acted out a description of what it was they wanted him to do, until at last he said impatiently, “You can say it in words. I do understand your language, you know.”

But that seemed to bewilder them. They continued to point and nod and jerk their heads at him.

“Can’t you understand what I’m saying?” he asked.

Maybe they spoke some dialect here so different from the Indigene he had learned in Keilloran that they regarded him as speaking some foreign language. But he saw he was wrong: he heard them talking among themselves, and the words they were using were, in general, understandable enough. Finally he did succeed in getting them to address him directly. It was as though they did not want to speak with him. His using their language made them uncomfortable. This village must not have had much contact with Masters, or with Folk either, for that matter, and looked upon him as some sort of alien thing, which had come their way as a kind of gift of the gods but which was not to be regarded in any way as fit to hold converse with. It was another step in his depersonalization, Joseph thought. As he moved southward he was getting farther and farther from the sort of existence he had had in the village of the Ardardin. Back there he had not had any such sense of solitude, of lostness, of thing ness, as he was beginning to feel down here.

But it was important to bear in mind that he was getting closer to home all the time, though he knew that Keilloran and its House were still a tremendous distance away.

He had no objection to blessing their food supply, if that was what they wanted him to do. Joseph had long since ceased to care what sort of hocus-pocus he performed for the sake of earning his passage to the Southland. Just as at the beginning, in that time only a few months earlier when he was much more naive than he had since become, he had felt it was some obscure violation of his honor as a Master to pretend to know anything about medicine, and that had very quickly ceased to be an issue for him, so too now, if the folk here wanted him to play the role of a demigod, or of a demon, or of anything else that might suit their needs, he was quite willing to do it. Whatever got him homeward: that was his new motto.

And so he let himself be taken into their storage-houses, to their bins of grain and berries and their hanging sides of drying meat and their casks of wine and all the rest that they had laid down for their use in the coming winter, and he threw back his shoulders and raised his head toward the heavens and held up his hands with his fingers outspread, and he cried out anything that came into his mind. “Cailin, Rickard, and Eitan, bless this food! In the name of Kesti and Wykkin and Domian, may virtue enter this food! I call upon Balbus! I call upon Anceph! I call upon Rollin!” He called upon the great ones of Old Earth, too, Agamemnon and Caesar and Genghis Khan, Napoleon and Gilgamesh. What harm did it do? These bins of grain would be none the worse for it. And this village had paid a high price for him: he must try to make them feel they had had their money’s worth.

I am becoming a terrible hypocrite, Joseph thought.

And then he thought, No, I am simply growing up.

He examined that little interchange with himself often during the long rainy days ahead, as he twisted dislocated joints back into place and soothed sprains and stitched cut flesh together and made important-looking holy passes in the air over the prostrate forms of Indigenes who were suffering from ailments that he could not diagnose. I am simply growing up. Throughout much of his adolescence he had wondered what it would be like to be grown up. He knew that he would change, of course. But how? What would he learn? What would he forget? How much of his present self would he remember, when he was a man like his father, carrying the responsibilities that men like his father carried? Would he become hard and cruel, like so many of the adults he had observed? Do foolish things? Make needless enemies?

Well, now he was growing up very fast, and growing up seemed to involve putting aside all the lofty Master ideals that his father had taught him by example and Balbus by direct precept, and simply doing whatever he had to do, day by day, in order to survive. Otherwise, he was not going to get to grow up at all. However much future he was going to have would depend to a great extent on how resourceful he showed himself to be on this strange, unexpected journey across unknown Manza.

It rained virtually every day, the whole time he was in this village. By the time they decided they had earned back the price they had paid for him and were ready to sell him to the next tribe down the road, rivers were leaping their banks and meadows had turned to marshes. But the rain did hold off on the day of his next transfer. Once again he rode in an open cart down a cobbled Indigene road.

The gray sky gave him little clue to the position of the sun, but he seemed to be going south: at least, he hoped so. Joseph had long ago lost track of how much time had passed since the wild night of his escape from Getfen House, nor did he have any notion of the distance he had covered in this series of jolting cart-rides from village to village. He hoped that he was out of High Manza by now and somewhere down in the central part of the continent, but the Indigenes neither would nor could give him any help in determining that, and the reference books he had with him afforded no useful information, other than to tell him that the central part of the continent was mountainous.

That was good news, because he did seem to be coming into higher country. He saw bare serrated hills off to the west, and what seemed like higher peaks behind them. The air was colder, too. Each day was a little chillier than the one preceding. Joseph had never experienced really cold weather before. In his region of the Southland a kind of eternal mild springtime prevailed, all the year round. He had managed to obtain new linen robes from one of the Indigene villages to replace the shredded and tattered clothes he had been wearing since the start of his journey, but Indigenes did not appear to be very sensitive to changes in temperature, and the fabric was light stuff, ill suited to a winter journey. Speaking in the grammar of a supplicant, he was able to get them to give him more, but, even wearing double and triple thicknesses, he found himself shivering most of the time.

He had grown very thin, also. He had always been active and athletic, and his build was naturally long-limbed and slender, but the privations of his trip and a diet made up mostly of meat and fruit had melted from him what little fat there was, and he was beginning to worry about the loss of muscle and bone. When he pinched his skin he felt nothing between his fingers but the skin itself. The various villages did not begrudge him food, but it did not appear to put any flesh on him. He had no access to mirrors here, but he could feel what was happening to his face, the cheeks becoming gaunt and drawn, the bones standing out sharply. He was gaunt all over, mere skin and bones. He knew he must look like a wild man. Though he attempted periodically to trim his hair, since Masters did not wear their hair long, he knew it must by now be an uncouth shaggy mane. His beard, which he also tried ineffectually to trim, had turned coarse and thick, a black pelt that covered most of his face to a point high up on his cheeks. No one would recognize him, he knew, if he were to be miraculously transported back to Keilloran House right now. They would run from him in fright, screaming.

The odd and disturbing thing was that as he grew thinner, his appetite, which had always been so voracious, seemed to be diminishing. He rarely felt hungry any more. Whatever they gave him to eat seemed to suffice. He had to force himself to swallow more than he really wanted, and sometimes, against all logic, he did not succeed. He had become light, very light, so light that he felt it would be no great task to kick himself free of the ground and go floating up into the sky, drifting like an untethered balloon above the clouds. That was an interesting fantasy, but it was also a bad sign that such thoughts were entering his mind. They were a sign of hallucinatory delusion, perhaps. He needed to keep his strength up, to build himself back toward whatever might be the minimum level he would need to carry him across the thousands of miles that stood between him and home.

Two more trades and he was in the foothills of what unquestionably must be the mountains of the region known as Middle Manza. It was still the rainy season, and there was a coating of snow on the distant peaks. The air was not only cooler but thinner here, so that his heart worked harder with every step he took and quickly began to pound, and he often had to pause to catch his breath as he moved about in a village. There were dizzy spells, too. One time Joseph thought he was going to faint. How much of his present weakness and lack of appetite was the result of the altitude and how much from loss of weight, he could not say.

When I come down out of these mountains, he promised himself, I will try to eat more and regain my strength. Whatever it is they give me to eat, I will eat all of it, and then I will ask them to let me have some more.

The world of Masters and Folk seemed very far away in these hilly parts. The kinds of farming that were practiced in the lowlands were difficult if not impossible in this harsh rocky terrain, and though occasional settlements had been attempted, it looked as though most of the region had been left untouched. There were no modern highways here, no dams, no cities, no Great Houses. Sometimes Joseph would catch sight of curling white plumes of smoke far away, rising from what he suspected were the chimneys of a Folkish village along the edge of some high slope. He had heard that in remote rural districts like these there had always been places where the Folk still lived apart from the modern world, lived as they had before the Conquest, simple farmers and hunters unaffected by the presence of Masters. They might occasionally have contact with outsiders but had never become part of the world’s economic system. Joseph never was brought close enough to any of those smoke-plumes to determine whether his guess was correct, though. For the most part the foothill zone, where it was inhabited at all, was inhabited by Indigenes, dwelling as always in little widely separated villages.

He was shifted from one village to another every few weeks. Each shift brought him into higher territory: the air was no longer cool but cold, almost painfully so, and white cloaks of snow now could be seen not just on far-off peaks but along the summits of the hills overlooking the villages themselves. There seemed to be relatively less work for him to do here than in the lowlands, as if, perhaps, these mountain Indigenes were a hardier breed than their cousins below. The price that was being paid for him diminished as he was shuffled along through the mountains: a few handfuls of beads and some mangy mats were enough now to buy him. But his buyers did still seem to understand that he was a human being in transit, that they were supposed to keep him for only a little while and then pass him along to the next tribe to the south.

They rarely spoke to him, in these villages. The farther Joseph got from the Indigenes of the north, who had lived in the territory between House Getfen and House Ludbrek and were at least accustomed to having glancing contact with Masters, the less responsive the villagers became to him in general. It was inescapably clear that he was simply a commodity to them, an itinerant medicine-man, something to be traded from village to village according to the rhythms of the villagers’ own needs. They did not perceive themselves as having any direct transaction with him. He barely seemed even to exist for them. Somehow he had lost human status in their eyes, whatever human status might actually mean to them. It had actually been interesting to live among the northern Indigenes, not just a fugitive but also an observer studying the folkways of this intelligent and appealing race, but that was over, now. He had passed into some new realm of being in which he was practically inanimate, a thing to be bought and sold like a stack of furs. It made for a stark, frighteningly lonely existence. More than once Joseph awoke to find himself in tears.

Most of their communication with him, always minimal at best, was carried out by means of gestures. More and more they gave him the impression that they did not expect him to understand their language, and even when he showed them that he did, that impression did not appear to be dispelled. His words barely registered on them, and they would go right back to using gestures the next time. But otherwise most of them treated him reasonably well, giving him plenty of food and decent lodgings. In one village, when they saw how badly he was taking the chill of the mountain air, they provided him with a mantle of dark furs to wrap around himself, and let him keep it when they sold him onward to the adjacent tribe a little while afterward.

The trouble was that he did not think he was moving southward any longer. The weather was still so rainy, or sometimes snowy, that Joseph rarely got a clear enough view of the sky to work out much sense of the direction he was traveling in. But it seemed to him now that they had begun to sell him sidewise, shuttling him back and forth over the crest of these hills according to the lie of their own villages rather than in accordance with any need of his own, and his calculations appeared to show that there was never much change in latitude.

“I am going south,” he told them, when his time was up at the next village. “I am returning to my family in the southern continent.” But where he happened to want to go was no concern of theirs. “Do you understand me?” he said. “I must go south.” They crossed their arms at him. They understood what he was saying, perhaps; but they did not care. This was the other side of that placid Indigene indifference. They felt no resentment over the conquest of their entire world by humans, perhaps, but they owed no obeisance, either. The next day, when they set out with him to take him his newest home, the route that the wagon followed led unmistakably east.

Not to be going forward was the same thing as to be sliding backward. So Joseph knew that this phase of his journey, the phase in which he had tried to make his way back to his home across Manza as the chattel of helpful Indigenes, was coming to an end. They had ceased to be helpful, now. He would never reach Helikis if they went on shipping him around the central highlands forever in this lateral way. He saw that he was going to have to break away from them and proceed on his own.

But he hesitated to take the step. The notion of setting out through these mountains alone, in winter, with cold rain falling every day and now and then snow, was a troublesome one. What would he eat? Where would he sleep? How would he keep from freezing to death?

And also he wondered whether it might anger the last villagers in the sequence if he were to slip away from them before they had had a chance to strike a deal for him, thus cheating them of the opportunity to turn a profit, or at the worst break even, on their temporary ownership of him. Would they go in pursuit of him? He had never heard of Indigenes becoming angry over anything. But these Indigenes of the mountains were very little like the ones he had known in Keilloran, or in the Manza lowlands. They might not take his disappearance lightly. It was entirely possible that he would become the first Master to be a fugitive not just from rebel Folk but from Indigenes as well.

I will wait a little longer, he told himself. Perhaps the winter will end soon, or they will start selling me southwards again, or at least I will be sent the next time to some village in the foothills, so that when I escape I will be able to find my way down into the lowlands, where it is warmer and I will have some hope of foraging for food.

And indeed it began to seem as if they were moving him south again. There were two big leaps, one long ride that took him to a mountaintop village gripped by such terrible cold that not even snow would fall and the ground was locked in an iron rigidity and seemed to clang when you walked on it, and then another down the far slope to an easier place of leaping brooks and green gullies thick with ferns; and each of these places, the frostbound one and the ferny one, appeared to be well south of its predecessor. Joseph took heart from that. Two more such leaps and he might be out of the mountains altogether.

But he had rejoiced too soon. When he left the Indigenes of the fern-gully village, it was by way of a winding route up and up into the ridge above their sheltered district and down the other side, and then, all day long on a day of clear crisp weather and a second day just like it following, along a straight road with the sun sitting in the southern sky behind them like a great mocking eye. Joseph waited for the road to swing about, but never once did it deviate from that northward bearing. When at last they handed him over to his newest purchasers, he noted that the village to which he had been brought lay in a sloping saddle facing west, with mist-shrouded lowlands in the valley below, and a lofty chain of peaks rising like a wall behind him to the east. So he had gained a little by getting closer to the western side of the high country, where he expected that the descent into the lowlands would be easier, but he had lost a great deal through backtracking northward, and who was to say where they would send him after this? The earlier sidewise shuttling had been bad enough; but now he was going in circles. Regardless of the risks, it was time for him to take matters into his own hands.

It was the evening of Joseph’s third day in this latest village. There was very little medical work for him here: a case of what looked like frostbite, and an inflamed jaw, and an infected hand. In general he found the place cheerless and unwelcoming. It was a small village and its people seemed sullen and morose, although Joseph had seen often enough before the unwisdom of trying to interpret the postures and facial expressions of Indigenes according to what he understood of human postures and expressions. He reminded himself that these people were not human and it was wrong to think of them as though they were.

But it was hard to regard them as anything but unfriendly. They never said anything to him except out of necessity, as when informing him of things he had to know in order to find his way around the village. Nor did they seem ever to look directly at him; instead they turned their heads sideways and gave him oblique slitted glances. They did appear to have some curiosity about him, but not of the kind that would lead to any sort of real communication between him and them. Perhaps they had never seen a human before, in this remote, isolated place. He was nothing but a freakish anomaly to them, an intruder from a part of the world they wanted nothing to do with. Well, that made it all the easier for him to leave with a clear conscience.

He thought he would try the combinant one more time before setting out. Joseph had not so much as touched it for many weeks, but it had navigational functions as well as being a communications device, and he had some hope that it might work better at this altitude than it had in the lowlands. He activated it and it gave him the same odd pink glow and meaningless sputtering sounds that he had been getting from it since the village of the Ardardin. But as he started to put it back in his pack a long double-jointed hand reached out from behind him and gently but firmly took the device from him.

He had not heard them come in, but three Indigenes had entered his room. Joseph thought he recognized the one who had taken the combinant from him as the head man of the village, but he was not sure, since they were so uncommunicative here; village chieftains in this region wore no special regalia, and it was too soon after Joseph’s arrival for him to have learned to tell one villager from another.

It was holding the combinant in the palm of its hand and was prodding its buttons carefully with two fingers of the other.

“That’s a communications device,” Joseph said. “But it hasn’t been working right for a long time.”

The Indigene continued to poke at the combinant’s control panel. It was as though Joseph had not said anything at all. Apparently the Indigene was trying to replicate the pink glow that Joseph had drawn from it.

“Do you want me to show you how to do it?” Joseph asked, holding out his hand. He did not think it was wise to try to take the device from the Indigene by direct action.

But the Indigene had found the right button. The pink glow appeared, and the sputtering began. That seemed to interest it very much. It brought the combinant up within a couple of inches of its flat-featured face and studied it with what looked like keen fascination; then it turned and displayed the little machine to its two companions; and then it began to turn the thing over and over in its hand, as if searching for some way to make it do something else besides glow and sputter.

This is very atypical of you, Joseph thought. You people are not supposed to have any interest in our machines. Indeed you scorn them, is that not so? You regard them as the illusory products of an illusory race.

But either he had misunderstood some of the things the Ardardin had been telling him, or it was an error to imagine that all Indigenes had the same set of philosophical beliefs, or else this mountaineer simply thought the combinant was a particularly pleasing trinket. The three of them were passing it around, now, each taking a turn at pushing its buttons. Joseph felt uneasy about that. The combinant had not been working properly for a long while, either because it was itself broken or the entire worldwide communications system had been brought down, and in any case he doubted that these people could do any further harm to it. But he did not like to see the device in their hands. You were told not to make any artifacts of human technology available to Indigenes. That was the rule. It had been explained to him, once: doing so might tend to dilute the purity of their culture, or some such thing. Although Joseph could not see how letting the inhabitants of this remote village play with a broken combinant could do any harm to the purity of Indigene culture, some vestige of his sense of himself as a Master recoiled from this violation of custom.

Besides, the combinant was his . He had little enough left of the life that once had been his in the days when he had been Joseph Master Keilloran. What if they found the device so interesting that they decided to keep it—looking upon it, say, as one additional benefit that they were getting in return for the trade-goods they had given the fern-gully people for Joseph?

And that was exactly what they seemed to intend. The three Indigenes turned and started to go from the room, taking the combinant with them.

“Wait a minute,” Joseph said. “That instrument is mine. You may not have it.”

They paused by the door and looked back at him. Their expressions, insofar as he could interpret them at all, appeared to register surprise that he had said something. They did not show any indication that they had understood what he said, although he was sure that they had.

He held out his hand. “Give it to me,” he said, using the supplicatory mode. “I have need of it.”

What an Indigene of the Ardardin’s village would have replied, was, almost certainly, “I recognize your need,” and then it would have handed the combinant over. But these people recognized nothing. Once more they turned to leave.

“No,” Joseph said. “I must have it. Give it to me.” Not using the supplicatory any more: this was a direct request. And, when he saw that they were paying no heed, he followed it with the same statement phrased in the rarely used mode reserved for outright commands, which in this context might well be construed as insulting. It made no difference. They did not care about his grammar; probably they were amazed that he could utter intelligible words at all. But his wishes, his pleas, his orders, were equally unimportant to them. They went from the room and his combinant went with them.

Let them have it, Joseph thought sullenly, when his first surge of anger and frustration had died away. It was broken anyway.

Although he knew it meant leaving the combinant behind, he was still resolved to make his escape. The dry weather of recent days was still holding. It was senseless to stay among the Indigenes any longer. Not a day, not an hour, not a moment. He would depart this very night.

With a sense of growing excitement, even jubilation, he made his preparations, stuffing his pack with as much dried meat and berries as it would hold, filling with fresh water the wine-flask from Getfen House that had served as his canteen during his days in the forest, rolling up the mantle of dark furs an earlier village had given him and tying it around his waist. He looked into the corridor. No one seemed to be on guard out there.

The night was clear and cold, though not as cold as some recent nights had been. The stars of the Manza sky, which once had looked very strange to him but by now were only too familiar, wheeled overhead. The only moon that was visible was fast-moving little Mebriel, hardly brighter than a star itself. A dull red glow in the east, behind the mountains, told Joseph that big Sanivark would probably be coming over the horizon soon, lighting everything up with its brick-red beams, but he hoped to have this place well to his rear before that happened.

A bonfire was burning in the village plaza. The sound of singing voices drifted through the air. The Indigenes seemed to gather there most nights after dark, heedless as ever of the cold. Joseph turned and headed in the other direction, down past the infirmary and the town midden. Earlier that day he had seen a path that went behind the midden and seemed to lead on downslope into the woods that lay west of town.

He passed a couple of shadowy figures as he went. They gave him quick glances, but no one stopped him, no one questioned him. He was not a prisoner here, after all. And the barrier of reserve that existed between these people and him protected him now. Still, he wished he had not been noticed. If his disappearance bothered them when they found him gone in the morning, this would give them a clue as to the direction he had taken.

The path was steeper than he had expected. The village’s entire site sloped sharply to the west at something like a twenty-degree grade before the far side of the saddle-shaped valley in which the town was contained turned upward again, but the grade was irregular, flattening out in some places and dropping sharply in others. More than once Joseph found himself struggling down the side of what was essentially a huge ravine. The path quickly deteriorated too, now that he was some distance from town, so that in the moonlit darkness he could barely find it among all the brambles and woody briars that were encroaching on it, and on two occasions he wandered from it altogether and had to grope his way back. At all times he picked his way carefully, mindful of his agonizing stumble in the Getfen forest. Haste could be disastrous. His twisted knee had long since healed, but he knew that another such injury, out here by himself in these frosty woods, would mean the end of him.

Creatures hooted in the night. There were rustlings and cracklings all around him. He ignored all that. He forced himself steadily onward, moving as fast as he dared, guiding himself by a big icy-looking star that lay dead ahead. The only thing that mattered right now was putting distance between himself and the Indigene village.

It was hard work. Though Joseph had grown accustomed to the altitude after so many weeks in the mountains, he felt the strain of it nevertheless: his heart boomed in his chest and his breath came short, and for long stretches he found himself panting, which dried out his mouth and tempted him to dip into his precious water supply. He fought the temptation back. In this mountain saddle the drainage patterns were all wrong for streams, and he could not say when or where he would find his next source of fresh water: on the other side of the slope, no doubt.

But then the path showed signs of beginning to turn upward, and the ascent became a continuous one, which told him that he had finally reached the far side of the saddle, the shallow western rise that separated the village from the lowlands beyond. With his goal so close, Joseph stepped up his pace, pushing himself to the limits of his strength. The warmth of his own exertions protected him against the cold. He could feel streams of sweat running down the sides of his rib-cage, not an unpleasant sensation, as he forced himself up the steep trail. There would be time to rest later. He prayed for an easy descent into the lowlands once he was over the summit of the western ridge.

By the time Joseph attained it, though, he could see that no such easy descent was going to be granted him. Sanivark, emerging at last above the top of the mountains of the east with little Keviel trailing along behind, gleamed like a red lantern over his head, showing him the disheartening sight of a second saddle rolling just to the west of him, and what looked very much like a third one westward of that. Neither one had been visible from the village. He would have to cope with both of them, and who knew what obstacles beyond those, before he reached the lowlands.

He did not seem to be the object of any pursuit, at any rate. The village was only dimly visible, gratifyingly far behind him to the east—the smoke of its bonfire, the lights of a few of its houses—and there was no sign that anyone was moving toward him through the scrubby woods between there and here that he had just traversed. So he was free, no longer a commodity, no longer trade-goods being passed on from village to village. His only problem now was staying alive in these wintry woods.

He crouched for a time to the leeward of the saddle-top, catching his breath, letting his sweat dry, nibbling a bit of dried meat, studying the terrain ahead. But there was not going to be any rest for him. When he had stayed there long enough so that he was starting to feel the cold again, Joseph picked up and moved along, scrambling down into the second saddle and onward into the third, which turned out to be a low flattened basin offering no real challenge. The trail had given out, or else he had lost it, but that scarcely mattered. He was fully in the rhythm of it. He moved on and on. There were no more ridges: it was a straight downhill glide now into the misty lands below.

He thought several times of stopping to sleep, but no, he wanted to be out of the high country, entirely out, before he permitted himself to halt. Sanivark went sailing past him overhead, moving into the western sky and showing him his goal, a shrouded realm of drifting whiteness. The mists thinned as he went down toward it, and just as the pale strands of first light began coming over his shoulder he saw a green meadow not far below him, and a stream or perhaps a small river, itself nearly invisible but outlined by a long bank of fog that clung to it like cotton batting.

This was as far as he could go without resting. At the place where the last stretch of highland forest shaded into the meadow bordering the riverbank he found a deserted campsite that probably had been used by hunters in the autumn, and settled into it. There was a little cave that someone had roughly excavated out of the side of the hill, a stone fireplace with cold charcoal still in it and the charred bones of some fair-sized animal scattered about nearby, and a stack of firewood perhaps awaiting use by the returning hunters in the spring. Joseph dined on dried meat and berries and crawled into the cave just as the last few stars were disappearing from the rapidly bluing sky. He unwrapped his fur mantle and curled it around himself, tucked his hands into his robes, and closed his eyes. Sleep rolled over him like a tumbling boulder.

He awoke at midday. A great silence enfolded him, broken only by the screeching caws of the dark birds that were whirling in enormous circles above him in the cloudless sky. The mists had lifted and the sun was bright overhead. He dutifully said his morning prayers and breakfasted sparingly and sat for a long while looking back at the mountains out of which he had come, thinking about his zigzag route through the highlands these past weeks or months and wondering whether in all that time he had succeeded in getting significantly closer to the Southland. He doubted it. Certainly he was somewhat farther south than on the day when he had stood staring at the dismal blackened remains of Ludbrek House, but a map, he suspected, would show him that he had traveled no more than a finger’s breadth of the total distance separating him from his father’s distant lands.

By this time there would be no reason for anyone at home to think that he was still alive. The Keillorans were basically optimistic people, but they were not fools, and such a degree of optimism would be nothing if not foolhardy. He was here, and they were there, and there was so much territory between that he knew he might just as well start thinking of himself as irretrievably lost, which was not quite the same thing as being dead, but not all that far from it.

I am the only one in the world who knows where I am, he thought. And all I know is that I am here , though I have no way of knowing where here is.

Joseph looked up at the blank blue screen that was the sky.

“Father!” he cried, setting up echoes as his voice reverberated off the mountains from which he had just descended. “Father, it’s me, Joseph! Can you hear me? I’m in Manza, Father! I’m on my way home!”

That was at least as useful as talking into a broken combinant, he told himself. And it was good to hear the sound of a human voice again, even if it was his own.

He went down to the stream, stripped, bathed. The water was so cold it felt like fire against his skin, but he had not been able to bathe very often in the mountain villages, and he forced himself through an elaborate ablution. He washed his clothes also, and set them out to dry in the sunlight, sitting naked beside them, shivering but strangely happy in the silence, the isolation, the brightness of the day, the fresh clear air.

And then it was time to get going. There was nothing like a road here for him to follow, not even a footpath, but the land was flat, and after his nighttime scramble through the mountain foothills this seemed almost preposterously easy. Just put one foot forward and then another, on and on, keep the mountains to your left and the stream to the right and the sun shining on your nose, and you will find that you are heading toward home, getting closer with every step you take.

No one seemed to live in this district. He wondered why. The soil seemed fertile enough, there was plenty of fresh water, the climate was probably all right. Yet he saw no sign that the Folk had farmed here, and none of the claimstones that would mark land belonging to one of the Great Houses, and no trace of a settlement of Indigenes, even. But of course this was a large continent and much of it, even after all these centuries of the human presence on Homeworld, was still as it had been when the first Folkish explorers had landed here.

A strange concept, Folkish explorers . Joseph had never examined the glaring contradictions in the term before. The Folk were such stolid, unadventurous, spiritless, passive people, or at least that was how he had always regarded them. Everyone did. One did not think of people like that as explorers. It was hard to imagine that any of them could have had enough fervor of the soul to get themselves out into spaceships and travel across the empty light-years and discover Homeworld, and yet they had. Hadn’t achieved much once they got here, no, but they had managed to go looking for it, and find it, and settle it.

And yet, stolid and unadventurous and spiritless and passive though they might be, they had also found enough fervor within themselves just now to rise up here in the northern continent or perhaps throughout the entire world and kill most or all of the Masters, and set fire to their houses, and wreck their estates. That was something worth thinking about. Perhaps we have never understood much about the Folk at all, Joseph told himself. Perhaps they are almost as alien to us as the Indigenes or the noctambulos, or the alien races that live on the other worlds of the galaxy.

He went along steadily, marching from sunrise to sundown, stopping to eat whenever he felt hungry, finding some cave or burrow or other sort of shelter for himself at night. The weather grew better every day. Sometimes there were brief rainstorms, mild and pleasant, nothing like the hard chill downpours of the high country. He often took off his clothes and stood naked in the rain, enjoying the sensation of cool clean water striking his skin.

This was beautiful country, still completely devoid of any sort of settlement. There was a springtime feel to the air. Green new growth was appearing everywhere. Dazzling carpets of tiny flowers, some pink, some yellow, sprang up after each rain-shower. They seemed to come straight out of the ground, without any leaves. Joseph made no attempt to keep track of the passing of the days. He still clung to the fantasy that if only he kept walking at this steady pace, ten miles a day, fifteen, however much he might be able to cover, he would come to the bottom of this continent sooner or later and cross over into Helikis, where, he wanted to believe, there had been no Folkish uprising and he would find people to help him get the rest of the way home.

He knew there was some element of folly in the belief that he had been clinging to all this while—without a shred of evidence to support it—that everything was still normal in Helikis. If there had been no rebellion in the southern continent, why had the southern Masters not sent aid to their beleaguered cousins in the north? Why were no military planes roaring northward overhead? Why no armies marching swiftly to set thing to rights? But he wanted to think that all was well in the Southland, because this whole long march of his would be pointless, otherwise. Joseph told himself that he had no knowledge about what was going on in most of the world, anyway. In all these months of wandering he had covered only a tiny area of the planet. There might be a tremendous civil war under way on a hundred different battlefields even now, while he, cut off from everything and everyone, plodded southward day by day in solitude through this quiet uninhabited region.

Uninhabited by Masters and Folk and Indigenes, at any rate. There was plenty of animal life. Joseph did not recognize any of the creatures he encountered as he went along, though some of them seemed to be northern variants of animals that were native to the southern continent. There was a plump round beast, quite large, with coarse red fur and a fat little comical tail, that seemed surely to be a relative of the benevongs of the south. There was another, cat-sized, with huge restless eyes and a formidable cloak of twitching blue spines, that beyond much doubt was the local version of the shy, easily frightened thorkins that he had sometimes seen digging for tasty roots along the banks of country streams. But the rest were completely new to him: a squat, broad-nosed climbing animal with brown and yellow spots; and a big, loose-jointed, thick-thighed creature whose tiny, pointed head seemed to have been borrowed from a much smaller animal; and a low-slung snuffling thing, long and sleek, that moved across the land in tightly clustered packs.

None of these showed the slightest fear of him, not even the one that looked like a thorkin. A thorkin of the Southland would have turned and bolted at the first sign of a human, but this animal simply stood its ground and stared. The sleek pack-creatures, who appeared to be browsing for insect nests in the ground, went right on about their business without paying heed to him at all. The big shuffling beast with the small head actually seemed to want to be friendly, wandering up so close that it was Joseph who backed uncertainly away.

One day he stumbled into a small encampment of poriphars in a clearing at the edge of a grove of handsome little white-barked trees, and understood why there were no Indigene villages in these parts. Indigenes would not trespass on the territory of other intelligent beings; and poriphars, like noctambulos and meliots and a couple of other native species, qualified as intelligent, if only just marginally. They were mere naked nomadic beasts, but it was known that they had a language; they had a tribal structure of some sort; they were advanced enough technologically to have the use of fire and simple tools. That was about all Joseph knew about them. A few wandering tribes of poriphars were found in Helikis, but they were mainly a northern species.

He came upon them suddenly, and they seemed as uncertain of how to regard the strange being who had materialized among them as Joseph was to deal with them. There were about a dozen of them, graceful impressive-looking creatures about his own size, with taut, muscular bodies that were densely covered with thick black-and-white-striped fur. Their long, narrow, leathery feet ended in powerful curving claws; their black, glossy hands were equipped with small, efficient-looking fingers. They had triangular faces with jutting wolfish snouts terminating in shiny black noses. Their eyes, large and bright and round, a deep blue-black in color, were protected by heavy brow-ridges.

The poriphars were sitting in a circle around a crude oven made of rocks, roasting spitted fish over the flames. When Joseph stepped out from behind a great gray boulder into their midst, very much to his surprise and theirs, they reacted with immediate uneasiness, moving closer to one another, bodies going tense, nostrils quivering. Their eyes were fixed closely on him, warily, as though a solitary human being, traveling on foot and carrying no visible weapons, might actually pose some threat to this band of strong, sturdy animals.

Slowly and clearly Joseph said, speaking in Indigene, “I am a traveler. There is no one else with me. I am going southward.”

No response. The same wary glances.

“I am hungry. Can you give me some food?”

The same keen stares, nothing more.

The aroma of the roasting fish was overwhelming. It filled the air. Joseph felt famished, almost dizzy with hunger. He had eaten nothing but dried meat and berries for days, in decreasing quantities as his supplies began to run low. He had practically none left by now.

“Can you understand me?” he asked. He patted his abdomen. “Hunger. Food.”

Nothing.

He had often heard that all the various intelligent life-forms of Homeworld were able to speak Indigene, but perhaps that was not true. Without much hope Joseph tried Folkish and then Master, with the same result. But when he patted his stomach again and pointed silently to one of the skewers of fish, then to his own lips, and pantomimed the act of chewing and swallowing, they seemed to comprehend at once. A brief debate ensued among them. Their language was one of rapid clicks and buzzing drones, probably impossible for human vocal apparatus to imitate.

Then one of the poriphars stood—it was a head taller than Joseph; it probably could have killed him with one swipe of those sinewy arms—and yanked a skewer of fish from the fire. Carefully, using those agile little fingers with an almost finicky precision, it pried a thick slab of pale pinkish meat from the fish and handed it to him.

“Thank you,” Joseph said, with great gravity.

He performed an elaborate salute, touching his forehead and his chest and bowing. Most likely the gesture had no meaning whatever for the poriphars, but it was the best he could do. He wished he had something to offer them in return, but he doubted that his remaining berries would interest them, and there was nothing else he could spare.

The temptation to cram the fish into his mouth and bolt it all down at once was a hard thing to resist, but Joseph ate as slowly as he could. It had a sweet, smoky flavor, heartbreakingly delicious. The poriphars remained quite motionless while he ate, watching him. Occasionally one of them made a clicking, buzzing comment. They still seemed uneasy. Their restiveness was an almost palpable thing.

Joseph had been alone for so many days that he wanted to stay for a while, somehow to talk with them, to tell them about himself and learn things about them, perhaps to find out about the nature of the route that lay ahead, or even about the civil war. But of course all that was impossible. There was no way to communicate. And he did not need a degree in alien psychology to understand that they had no interest in making his acquaintance, that the only thing they desired from him was that he remove himself from their presence without further delay.

Which he did, after making a final brief speech in Indigene on the off chance that they might indeed know something of that language. He apologized for having disturbed them and told them how grateful he was for their kindness in feeding a lone hungry wanderer, how he would if in any way he could repay their hospitality at another time. To this they made no reply, or showed any indication that they had understood. He walked away from them without looking back.

A couple of days later he saw a plane pass high overhead—the first manifestation of the outside world since he had fled from the Indigenes. Joseph stood staring up, wondering whether he was experiencing some hallucination brought on by hunger. The plane was so far above him, a mere dark winged speck in the sky, that he could hardly hear it at all, nothing more than a distant faint humming sound such as an insect might have made, nor could he identify it in any way. It was traveling in a northwesterly direction. Whose plane was it? Was it possible that they still could have regular commuter service between Helikis and Manza?

It seemed like a thousand years ago that he had made his own flight northward. Ten thousand; a million. The airstrip at Keilloran; the excitement of departure; his father and brothers and sisters loading him down with gifts to bring the Getfens; Anceph and Rollin climbing aboard with the luggage, and then Balbus, beckoning to him to follow. The flight had taken eleven hours, the longest flight of his life. How creaky he had felt when he disembarked at the Getfen airstrip! But then, his fair-haired laughing Getfen cousins all around him, sturdy Wykkin and bright-eyed Domian and lovely fragrant Kesti, and dark, stocky Gryilin Master Getfen behind them, his hosts for the summer, his new friends, the companions of his coming-of-age year—

Ten million years ago. A billion.

The plane, if a plane indeed was what it was, vanished from sight in the northern sky. Now that it was gone he began to doubt that he had really seen it. There must not be any planes flying any more, he told himself. If you wanted to go from one continent to another these days you would have to do it on foot, a journey that would take three years, or five, or forever. We have become prehistoric here. Something terrible has happened on Homeworld and a great silence has fallen over everything, he thought. The rebellious Folk have risen up in wrath and hurled the world back into medieval times—but not even the medieval time of Homeworld, but that of Old Earth, the time of candlelight and horses and tournaments of chivalry. What actually had horses been? he wondered. Something like bandars, Joseph guessed, swift high-spirited animals that you rode from place to place, or set against one another in races.

The plane, real or not, had reminded him of how easy it once had been to travel from one place to another on Homeworld, and how difficult, how well-nigh impossible, it had become. Heartsick, he thought of the vast curving breast of the world that lay before him, the great impossible span of distance. What madness it had been to think he could ever walk from Getfen to Keilloran! Joseph sank down against the ground, forehead pressing against his knees. His head swam with despair.

Up, he told himself sternly.

Up and get yourself moving. One step and another and another, and someday you will be home.

Perhaps.

But the last of the food he had brought with him from the Indigene village was gone. Joseph found himself thinking longingly of the stewed meat they ate in those villages, the porridges, the milky wine. He had not much liked the wine then, but now he tasted it in his mind and it seemed heavenly, the finest taste in the universe. He imagined a silvery shimmering in the air before him and a flask of the wine miraculously dropping out of nowhere at his feet, and perhaps a pan of the braised illimani meat too. That did not happen. All the euphoria of those early springtime days when he had first come down out of the mountains had disappeared. The carpets of pretty pink flowers, the green blush of new foliage, the sweet fresh spring rain falling on his naked body—that was all so far behind him, now, that it seemed like something he had dreamed. I am going to starve to death, Joseph thought.

He dug along stream-banks in the hope of finding mud-crawlers, but mud-crawlers did not seem to live here. He did find roots and bulbs that looked as though they might be safe to eat, and nibbled on them experimentally, making mental notes about which ones went down easily and which upset his stomach. He chewed the tender new shoots of bushes for their sweet juice. He broke into a nest of sash-weevils and coolly, methodically, ate the little yellow grubs. They had almost no taste; it was like eating bits of straw. But there had to be some nourishment in them somewhere, for they were living things.

You must not let yourself die of hunger, he told himself. You are Joseph Master Keilloran and you are on your way home to your family, and you need to maintain your strength for the long journey that lies ahead.

He no longer bothered to wash very often. The fresh, sparkling water of the streams felt too cold against his skin, now that there was so little flesh on his bones. His skin began to break out with little white-tipped red eruptions, but that seemed the least of his problems. He stopped washing his clothing, too, but for a different reason: the fabric had grown so threadbare and tattered that Joseph was afraid the robe would fall apart entirely if he subjected it to the stress of washing it.

He threw rocks at basking lizards, but never once did he hit one. They always seemed to come awake the moment he raised his arm and go scurrying away with astonishing speed. He ripped the bark from a tree and discovered brightly striped beetles underneath, and in a kind of wondering amazement at his own boldness—or perhaps, Joseph decided, it was only his own desperation—he put them into his mouth, one at a time. He ate ants. He broke a branch from a little tree and swung it through the air, trying to bat down insects with it, and actually caught some that way. He was surprised to observe how easily he could adapt to eating insects.

He talked to the animals that he met as he went along. They came out and stared at him without fear, and Joseph nodded to them and smiled and introduced himself, and asked whether they had heard anything about the war between Folk and Masters, and invited them to advise him on the edibility of the plants that grew nearby. Since they were creatures that were below the threshold of intelligence, they neither understood nor replied, but they did pause and listen. It occurred to Joseph that he should be trying to catch and kill some of them for their meat instead of holding these nonsensical conversations with them, but by this time he was too slow and weak to try that, and it seemed impolite, besides. They were his friends, companions of the way.

“I am Joseph Master Keilloran,” he told them, “and I would be most grateful if you would send word to my family that I am on my way home to them.”

He felt very giddy much of the time. His vision often became blurry. Hunger, he knew, was doing something to his brain. He hoped the damage would not be permanent.

One night Joseph was awakened by a blazing brightness on the horizon, a lovely red-and-yellow dome that quickly elongated to become a river of light climbing into the sky. Slowly he came to understand that it was a great fire somewhere very far off, and he wondered if the civil war was still going on, and, if so, who was attacking whom, and where. The brightness gave way to black smoke, and then he could see nothing at all.

Much later that same night, not long before sunrise, the thought came to Joseph as he lay in mazy suspension somewhere between sleep and wakefulness that if he were to hold his toes turned inward in a certain way as he walked he would be able to move two or even three times as fast as he usually did, and might even be able to leave the ground altogether and skate homeward two or three feet up in the air. It was an exciting idea. He could hardly wait for day to arrive, so he could put it to a test. But when he remembered it after he arose he saw the absurdity of it at once and was frightened to think that he had been able to entertain such a lunatic notion more or less seriously, even though he had not been fully awake at the time.

Whole days went by when Joseph found nothing to eat but ants. He did not even attempt to throw rocks at lizards any more, although they were abundant all around him, plump green ones with spiky red crests. Their meat, he imagined, was wonderfully succulent. But they were much too fast for him. And though he spent a great deal of time crouching beside streams trying to catch small darting fishes with his hand, they eluded him with ridiculous ease. He had stopped digging up roots or pulling green shoots from plants by this time, for he had begun to think they were poisoning him and was afraid to eat them.

He began to have headaches. His tongue seemed swollen and had a coppery taste. He could hear the blood pounding insistently in his temples. He shook constantly and walked with his arms wrapped tightly about his body as though he were still contending with the cold rain of the wintry highlands, though by all the outward signs he could tell that the days were growing steadily warmer, that it must be getting practically to be summer. Sometimes when Joseph had walked no more than half an hour he found it necessary to sit down and rest for ten or fifteen minutes, and occasionally longer. And then came a day when he could not continue at all after one of those rest-periods, when he simply settled down under a bush and let the time stretch on and on without getting up.

As he lay there he tried to conjure up a meal for himself out of nothing more than his imagination, a plate of sweet river-crabs followed by roast haunch of heggan in mint sauce, with baked compolls on the side, and a steaming brisbil pudding afterward. He had almost managed to delude himself into believing that he had really done it, that he had just enjoyed a rich, tasty dinner and was feeling much the better for it, when he regained enough clarity of mind to realize that it had been nothing more than a pleasant fantasy, that his stomach was still empty, that in fact he was on the verge of dying of starvation. He knew he was dying and almost did not care.

He lay back and closed his eyes. It seemed to him then that he heard the sounds of rumbling wheels nearby, of swiftly moving vehicles, as though there might be a highway just beyond the hedge across the way. But that had to be a delusion too. He had walked through this beautiful countryside for days, weeks, maybe even months, without ever finding any trace of civilized life other than the hunters’ camp that he had come upon on his very first day down from the mountains. The nearest settlement of any kind was probably still a hundred miles away. He would not live to see it.

He realized then that he did care, at least a little, that his life was reaching its end.

How embarrassing it is, Joseph thought, to be dying like this, not even sixteen years old, the heir to House Keilloran transformed into a ragged bundle of skin and bones lying under a bush in some unknown corner of Middle Manza. He had always been so competent, so very good at looking after himself. What were they going to think back in Keilloran when the news finally reached them of what had happened to him? Martin would not weep, no. One quick wince, perhaps: that would be all the outward sign of emotion he would permit himself to show. His father had not even wept when his own beloved wife had died, so suddenly and senselessly, of the bite of that harmless-looking little red toad that had fallen from a tree and landed on her arm. Probably he had never wept in his life. But Joseph knew what her death had done to his father inside, and he knew what his own death would do to him, too.

And his brother Eitan, who was six years younger than Joseph was and had always worshipped him—Eitan would simply not be able to believe that his wondrous brother Joseph had perished in this idiotic way. Eitan would deny the news; he would be angered by it, he would pound the messenger furiously with his fists, he would turn to his father and say in that solemn old-man manner of his, “This is not true, Joseph would never have allowed such a thing to befall him.”

And Rickard, three years older than Eitan—he would be angry too, but not for the same reason. Rickard, who now would have to become the heir to House Keilloran: how he would boil with rage at the realization that those responsibilities were unexpectedly going to be dumped upon him! Rickard was not the sort to run a Great House: everyone knew that, Rickard best of all. He was a clever boy, too clever for his own good, so bright that his intelligence worked against him. Rickard could always find ways to avoid handling anything difficult. Either he would sidestep any real challenge or he would simply allow it to flow around him like water around a boulder in a riverbed, whichever was easier. But it had never been necessary for him to be otherwise. He was only the second son. Joseph was the heir; Rickard knew he could look forward to a life of ease.

Perhaps Rickard would change, now that there was no Joseph and he was going to be the first in line to inherit. Now that he could see the duties that went with being the Master of House Keilloran heading toward him like an avalanche. Joseph hoped so. Perhaps Cailin would help him. She was fourteen, old enough to understand these things, old enough to show Rickard that it would no longer suffice for him to slide by on mere cleverness, that he must take the trouble now to put that cleverness of his to responsible uses, inasmuch as his older brother was dead and he would someday be the Master of the House in his own right. She was a wise girl, Cailin, much undervalued by everyone, as girls tended to be. He wished now that he had treated her better.

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 before 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.