The Longest Way Home

4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He liked the way she smiled. It was a pretty smile, he thought. She looked quite pretty herself, as Folkish girls went: her face very broad, as they all tended to be, strong bones, a wide nose, full lips, but her skin was pale and clear and her hair, straight and cropped short, was a soft golden color. So far as he was able to tell she was about his age, or perhaps a year or two older. I must be feeling better already even to be noticing these things, he told himself.

It troubled him that when he sat up like this the whole upper part of his body was bared to her, and she could see how scrawny he had become. That embarrassed him. He looked like a dead man, a skeleton that somehow still was covered with skin. But then he shivered, and the woman—was she the girl’s mother?—noticed that at once and put a wrap around his shoulders, a woolen thing, coarse and heavy, that felt unpleasantly scratchy against his skin but did at least hide his shrunken arms and hollow chest from view as well as keeping him warm. He took a few more bites of the bread and finished the milk.

“More?” the woman asked.

“I think not. Not just yet.”

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

“You should rest again now,” the woman said, and they all went out of the room.

He wandered off into a dreamless dozing reverie. Later, he could not possibly have said how much later, the boy or young man who had been in his room before came in with a bowl of the stuff they had been cooking and a plate of a grayish mashed vegetable, and Joseph tried without success to eat some. “I’ll leave it in case you want it,” the boy said. Again Joseph was alone.

Some time later he awoke with a full bladder, stumbled out of bed in the darkness with no good idea of where he ought to go, and tripped over some small piece of furniture, sending himself sprawling with a crash into something else, a little bedside table on which they had left a pitcher of water for him. The pitcher, landing on what seemed to be a stone floor, made a sound as it broke that he was certain would wake the whole household, but no one came. Joseph crouched where he had fallen, trembling, dizzy. After a few moments he rose unsteadily and tiptoed out into the hall. Because they had left him naked below the waist, and he did not want to reveal his emaciated thighs and belly to anyone he might encounter out there, especially not the girl, he took the coverlet from his bed and wrapped it around his hips. In the hallway there was just enough moonlight coming in so that he could see other bedrooms, and hear the sound of snoring coming from one or two of them. But he could not find anything that might be a lavatory.

He needed very badly to go by this time. A door presented itself that turned out to be the main door of the house, and he went outside, into the yard, moving steadily but with an invalid’s slow, cautious pace. All was silent out there. The whole village seemed to be asleep. The night was warm, the air very still. The two smaller moons were in the sky. A big brown dog lay curled up against the picket fence. It opened one yellow eye and made a soft, short growling sound, but did not otherwise react to Joseph’s presence. He walked past it, following along the line of the fence until he judged he was sufficiently far from the house, and opened the coverlet and urinated against a bush. Because all of his bodily functions had become so deranged, it took him an incredibly long time to do it, what seemed like hours. How strange, he thought, to be standing here like this in the yard of a Folkish house, peeing outdoors by moonlight, peeing slowly and endlessly the way an old man does. But all of this is a dream, is it not? It must be. It must.

He found his way back to his own bedroom without incident and dropped at once into deep sleep, the first really sound sleep he had had in more weeks than he could remember. When he awoke, it was long after daylight: floods of golden sunshine were pouring into the room. Someone had come in while he slept, picked up the overturned table, removed the fragments of the broken pitcher. The bowl of stew and the plate of mashed vegetables were still sitting on the cupboard where the boy who had brought them had left them. A stab of hunger pierced through him suddenly and he sprang from the bed, or tried to, but dizziness instantly overcame him and he had to sit again, trembling a little, racked by little shuddering spasms. When the shuddering stopped he got up again, very carefully this time, slowly crossed the room, ate a few spoonfuls of the vegetables, sipped at the stew. He was not as hungry as he had thought he was. Still, he was able to keep the food down, and after a little while he managed to eat some more of it.

They had put out clothing for him, good honest Folkish dress—brown cotton leggings, a singlet of gray wool, a leather vest, a pair of open sandals. Nothing fit him very well: the leggings were too short, the singlet too tight, the vest too loose across the shoulders, the sandals too small. Probably most or all of these things belonged to the boy of the house. But wearing them, ill-fitting or not, was better than going about naked, or wrapping himself in his bedsheet, or trying to get back into his filthy Indigene robes.

The woman who had cared for him last night came into the room. He saw that she was forty or so, plump, with weary dark-shadowed eyes but a warm, ingratiating smile. The girl and the young man who had been in the room last night were with her again. “I am Saban,” the woman said. “My daughter Thayle. Velk, my son.” Velk appeared to be eighteen or twenty, short, strongly built, dull-eyed, probably not terribly bright. Thayle did not seem as pretty as she had last night, now that Joseph could see the Folkish stockiness of her frame, but she looked sweet and cheerful and Joseph liked her smooth clear skin and the bright sheen of her yellow hair. He doubted that she was any older than sixteen, perhaps even a year or two younger; but it was very hard to tell. The Folk always looked older than they really were to him, because they tended to be so sturdily built, so deep-chested and thick-shouldered. Saban indicated a third person standing in a diffident slouch farther back in the room and said, “That is my man, Simthot.” About fifty, shorter even than his son, a burly man with powerful arms and shoulders, deeply tanned skin, the creases of a lifetime of hard work furrowing his expressionless face. “You are a guest in our house as long as you need to stay,” said Saban, and Simthot nodded emphatically. He appeared to be accustomed to letting his wife do the talking for him.

“I feel much better this morning,” Joseph told her. “It was good to sleep in a comfortable bed again, and to be able to eat a little food. I thank you for all your kindnesses.”

Was that too formal, too Master-like? Even though he spoke in Folkish, he was afraid of betraying his aristocratic origins by expressing himself too well. He wondered if a Folkish boy of fifteen or sixteen would ever be as articulate as that.

But Saban showed no sign of suspicion. She told him only that she was pleased that the night’s rest had done him good, and warned him not to try to recover too quickly. The town governor, she said, would come here later in the day to speak with him. Meanwhile, she suggested, he ought to get back into bed.

That seemed wise to him. He no longer felt as though he were on the brink of death, but he knew he had a long way to go before he had some semblance of vigor again.

Thayle brought him tea with honey in it, and stood by his bedside while he drank it. When he was done Joseph asked her for more of the bread she had given him the night before, and she brought that too, and watched him in a kind of placid satisfaction as he nibbled at it. Like her mother, she appeared to be taking an almost maternal interest in his welfare.

He needed to urinate again, and perhaps even to move his bowels, something he had not succeeded in doing in many days. But he still did not know where to go. Though Joseph would not have hesitated to ask a servant for the location of the nearest privy, if he were a guest in some Great House, he felt oddly inhibited about asking the girl. He was not even sure of the word for it in Folkish; that was part of the problem. But he knew he was being ridiculous. After a time he said, feeling heat rise to his cheeks, “Thayle, I have to—if you would please show me—”

She understood immediately, of course. He would not let her help him rise from the bed, though there was a bad moment of vertigo when he did, and he refused her arm as they went from the room. The lavatory was at the back of the house. Because he knew she was waiting for him outside to guide him back to his room, he tried to be as quick about things as he could, but his body was still not functioning normally, and he could not look her in the eye when he finally emerged a long time afterward. All she said was, “Would you like to go outside for some fresh air and sunshine?”

“I’d like that very much, yes,” he told her.

They emerged into the kitchen-garden. The warm sunlight felt good against his face. She stood very close beside him, as though afraid he might be too weak to stand on his own for long. The firm curve of her breast was pressing into his side. Joseph was surprised to observe how much he liked that. He was actually beginning to find her attractive despite or perhaps even because of her Folkish look, which was somewhat unsettling, though in an interesting way. I suppose I have been away from my own people too long, he thought.

He guessed that it was probably about noon. Very few townsfolk were around, just some very small children playing in the dust and a few old people busy on the porches of their houses. The rest were working in the fields, Joseph assumed, or accompanying their herds through the pastures. A peaceful scene. The dog that had been sleeping out here last night was still curled up on the ground, and again it gave him a quick one-eyed inspection and a soft little growl before subsiding into sleep. It was not easy to believe that elsewhere on Homeworld a bloody war was going on, estates being pillaged and burned, people driven into exile.

“What is this village called?” Joseph asked, after a little while.

“It’s a town, not a village,” Thayle said.

Evidently that was an important distinction. “This town , then.”

“You don’t know? Its name is Eysar Haven.”

“Ah. Eysar Haven.”

“Originally it was called something else, though that was so long ago that nobody remembers what. But then the name was changed to Eysar Haven, because he actually came here once, you know.”

“He? Eysar, you mean?”

“Yes, of course, Eysar. Who else? He was really here. Some people don’t even believe that Eysar truly existed, that he’s just a myth, but it isn’t so. He was here. He stayed for weeks and weeks, while he was making the Crossing. We know that to be a fact. And after he left the town was named for him. It’s wonderful to think that we walk on the very same ground that Eysar’s feet once touched, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It certainly is,” said Joseph carefully.

He felt that he was in dangerous territory here. There was a note of reverence and awe in Thayle’s voice. Eysar must be some great Folkish hero, whose name was known to one and all in the Folkish world. But Joseph had never heard of him. He stayed for weeks and weeks, while he was making the Crossing . What could that mean? A Master’s education did not include a great deal of Folkish history, nor Folkish mythology, for that matter. For all Joseph knew, Eysar had been a great Folkish king in the days before the Conquest, or the leader of the first Folkish expedition to land on Homeworld, or perhaps some sort of charismatic wonderworking religious leader. The thought that the Folk once had had great kings of their own, or glorious heroes, or revered religious leaders, and that they still cherished the memory of those great men, was a little startling to him, simply because it had never occurred to him before. And certainly it would not do at all for Thayle to find out that he had no knowledge of who this Eysar was, or the Crossing, or, for that matter, of any significant datum of Folkish life or culture.

He searched for a way to change the subject. But Thayle did the job for him.

“And where is it you come from?” she asked. “Ludbrek House, you said. Where is that?”

“Up in the north. On the other side of the mountains.”

“That far? You’ve come a very great distance, then. It’s hard to believe anyone could travel as far as that on foot. No wonder you suffered so much. —That’s a strange name for a town, Ludbrek House.”

“That’s not the town name. It’s the name of the Great House that ruled the district.”

“A Master-house?” Thayle said. “Is that what you mean?”

She spoke as though the system of Great Houses with satellite towns of Folk around them was nearly as unfamiliar to her as the deeds of Eysar were to him.

“A Master-house, yes,” he said. “We all belonged to Ludbrek House, many hundreds of us. But then the rebels burned it and I ran away. You don’t belong to any House here, then, is that right?”

“Of course not. You are among cuylings here. You mean you didn’t realize that?”

“Yes—yes, of course, I don’t know what I could have been thinking—”

Cuylings.

That word was new to him also. It must refer to free Folk, Folk who had managed to stay clear of the rule of the Masters, holding themselves somehow apart from the dominant economic structure of the world. Again Joseph saw how little he knew of these people, and what risks that posed for him. If he allowed this conversation to go on much longer she was bound to find out that he was an impostor. He needed to interrupt it.

He shook his head as though trying to clear it of cobwebs, and swayed, and gave a deliberate little lurch that sent him stumbling into her. As he came up against her he began to let himself fall, but she caught him easily—he was so light, so flimsy—and held him, her arm encircling his rib-cage, until he had found his footing again. “Sorry,” Joseph muttered. “Very dizzy, all of a sudden—”

“Maybe we should go inside,” she said.

“Yes. Yes. I guess I’m not strong enough yet to spend this much time on my feet.”

He leaned on her shamelessly as they returned to the house. She would be more likely to overlook his little lapses of knowledge if she could ascribe them to his general state of debilitation and exhaustion. He clambered gladly into his bed. When she asked him if he wanted anything to eat, Joseph told her that he did, and she brought him some of last night’s stew, which he ate with steadily increasing enthusiasm. Then he told her that he wanted to sleep for a while, and she went away.

But he was wide awake. He lay there thinking over their conversation—Eysar, cuylings, the Crossing—and remembering, also, the interesting sensations that the pressure of Thayle’s breast against his side had evoked in him. He enjoyed her company. And she seemed eager to make herself responsible for his welfare. Joseph saw that it would be only too easy to give himself away, though. There were only great gulfs of ignorance in his mind where the most elementary facts of Folkish life and history ought to be.

Stappin, the town governor, came to Joseph late that afternoon. Joseph was still in bed, sitting up staring idly at nothing at all, wishing he dared to take one of his books from his pack and read it, when the intense little man with the astonishingly broad shoulders and the bullet-shaped head entered his room. Joseph was instantly ill at ease. If he had come so close to revealing the truth about himself to Thayle in the course of the most casual sort of conversation, what chance did he have of concealing it from this hard-eyed, ruthless-looking man, who plainly had come here for the purpose of interrogating him? And what would happen to him, he wondered, once Stappin discovered his secret?

The governor had been doing a little research, too. He wasted no time on pleasantries. And he let it be known right away that he had his suspicions about Joseph’s story. “Ludbrek House, that is where you came from, is what you told us yesterday. How can that be? There are people here who have heard of that place. They tell me that Ludbrek House is such a very great distance from here. Beyond the mountains, it is.”

“Yes,” Joseph said impassively. He met the stony little eyes with an even stare. I am Joseph Master Keilloran, he told himself, and this man, formidable as he is, is only the governor of a Folkish town. With a little care he would get through this. “On the other side, in High Manza.”

With a little care, yes.

But he had let the words “High Manza” slip out without thinking. He regretted that at once. Did the Folk, he wondered, really use that term for the northern third of the continent, or was that in fact purely a Master designation?

With his very first statement he had quite possibly placed himself in peril. He saw that he must be more sparing in his replies. The less he said, the less likely was it that he would stumble into some blunder that would disclose the truth about himself. It had been a mistake to remind himself a moment ago that he was Joseph Master Keilloran: right now he was Waerna of Ludbrek House, and he must be Waerna down to his fingertips.

But Stappin did not seem to be bothered by the phrase itself, only by the improbability of the journey. All he said was, “That is many hundreds of miles. It was winter. It rains up there in the winter, and sometimes there is snow, also. There is little to eat. No one could survive such a journey.”

Joseph indicated his emaciated form, his wild tangled beard. “You can see that I very nearly did not.”

“No. You could not have survived, not on your own. Someone must have helped you. Who was that?”

“Why, it was the Indigenes,” Joseph said. “I thought you knew that!”

Stappin appeared genuinely startled. “They would not have done that. The Indigenes are concerned only with the Indigenes. They will have nothing to do with anyone else.”

“But they did,” Joseph said. “They did! Look, look there—” He indicated the ragged Indigene robes that he had been wearing when he arrived in Eysar Haven. Saban or Thayle had washed them and stacked them, neatly folded, in a corner of the room. “That cloth—it is Indigene weave. Look at it, Governor Stappin! Touch it! Can it be anything other but Indigene weave? And that fur mantle next to it. They gave it to me. They took me in, they fed me, they moved me from village to village.”

Stappin spent some time digesting that. It was impossible to tell what was going on behind those cold, hard eyes.

Then, unexpectedly, he said, “Why is it you speak so strangely?”

Joseph compelled himself to meet the governor’s gaze steadily, unflinchingly. “What do you find strange about my speech, Governor Stappin?”

“It is not like ours. Your tone of voice. The way you put your words together.”

Calm, he thought. Stay calm. “I am of Ludbrek House in High Manza, and this is the way we speak there. Perhaps a little of the Masters’ way of speaking has come into our speech and changed it. I could not say.”

“Yes. Yes. I forget: you are stendlings, there.”

Another new word. From the context Joseph guessed it was the antithesis of “cuyling,” and meant—what? Serf? Slave? Vassal? Something on that order.

He simply shrugged. He was not going to get into a discussion of a word whose meaning was uncertain to him.

“And how came it to pass,” Stappin said, and there was still an ugly little suspicious edge to his voice, “that you and the Indigenes became such great friends?”

“The uprising happened,” Joseph said. “That was the first thing.”

He studied Stappin carefully. By now Joseph had concluded that these cuyling Folk of Eysar Haven not only had taken no part in the rebellion, but that they must know very little about it. Stappin did not question his use of the term. He did not react to it in any way. He remained standing as he was, motionless beside Joseph’s bed, legs far apart, hands balled into fists and pressing against his hips, waiting.

“It was in the night,” Joseph said. “They came into the Great House and killed all the Masters there.” He searched about in his memory for the names old Waerna had mentioned, the dead Masters, the leader of the rebels, but he could not remember them. If Stappin queried him about that, he would have to invent the names and hope for the best. But Stappin did not ask for names.

“They killed everyone, the men and the women both, and even the children, and they burned their bodies, and they burned the house also. The place is a complete ruin. There is nothing left there but charred timbers, and all of the Masters of Ludbrek House are dead.”

“Did you help to kill them?”

“I? No, not I!” It was easy enough to sound genuinely shocked. “I must tell you, Governor Stappin, I was of the Folk of Ludbrek House. I could never have struck a blow against the Masters of the House.”

“A stendling, yes,” Stappin said. His tone did not seem so much one of contempt as of simple acknowledgment; but, taken either way, it left Joseph with no doubt of the word’s meaning.

“It would not be in my nature to turn against my Masters that way,” Joseph said. “If that is a mark against me, I am sorry for that. But it is the way I am.”

“I say nothing about that.” And then, with an odd little flicker of his eyes: “What work did you do, when you were at Ludbrek House?”

Joseph was unprepared for that. But he did not hesitate to answer. I must not lose my way, he told himself. “I was in the stables, sir,” he said, improvising dauntlessly. “I helped care for the bandars and the ganuilles.”

“And where were you while they were killing the masters and burning the house?”

“I was hiding, sir. Under the porch that faces the garden. I was afraid they would kill me too. I have heard that many Folk who were loyal to their Houses were killed by the rebels, everywhere in High Manza, and elsewhere too, perhaps.”

“When the killing was over, what did you do then?”

“There was no one in sight when I came out. I fled into the forest and lived on my own for a few days. Then I met a noctambulo in the woods who took me to a nearby village of Indigenes. I had hurt my leg and was unable to walk, and the Indigenes took me in and helped me.”

There still was obvious skepticism in the governor’s expression. These stories must seem like children’s fairy-tales to him, Joseph thought. Since everything Joseph was telling him now was the absolute truth, though, he began to feel that he had passed a critical stage in the interrogation. So long as he had been making things up, or borrowing pieces of the other Waerna’s account of the uprising, there was always the risk that Stappin would catch him out in a lie. But from this point on he would not be making things up. Sooner or later Stappin would have to accept his narrative as the truth.

He said, “When I recovered, I went into the service of the Indigenes. That may sound strange, yes. But I have some skills at healing the sick, from my work with the stables. When they discovered that, the Indigene villagers used me as a doctor for their own people for a time.” Joseph went on to explain how they had sold him, finally, to others of their kind, and how he had been passed from village to village in the high country while the winter rainy season came and went. Here, too, the governor would not be able find any chink of falsity in his tale, for it was all true. “At last,” he said, “I grew tired of living among the Indigenes. I wanted to be back among my own people. So I escaped from the village where I was, and came down out of the mountains. But I did not know that the land down here was as empty as it proved to be. There were no Great Houses, no villages of the Folk, not even any Indigenes. I used up the food I had brought with me and after a time I could find nothing anywhere to eat. There were many days when I ate nothing but insects, and then not even those. I made myself ready for death. Then I was found by two men of Eysar Haven, and the rest you know.”

He sat back, wearied by the long speech, and tried to ready himself for what Stappin was likely to ask him next, which he supposed would be a question about what he planned to do now. It would hardly be prudent to say that he was heading south, for what reason would he have for wanting to go in that direction? The best thing to reply, he guessed, was that he had no plan at all, that with his House destroyed he was without affiliation, without purpose, without direction. He could say that he had not taken the time to form any plan yet, since he would be in no shape to go anywhere for weeks. Later, when he was healthy again, he could slip away from Eysar Haven and continue on his way to Helikis, but that was nothing he needed to tell Governor Stappin.

The question that he had been expecting, though, did not come. Stappin confronted him again in inscrutable silence for a time, and then said, with a tone of finality in his voice, as though he had reached some sort of verdict within himself, “Once again your luck has held, young Waerna. There will be a home for you here. Saban and Simthot are willing to give you shelter in their house as a member of their own family. You will work for them, once you have your strength again, and in that way you will pay them back the cost of your lodging.”

“That seems quite fair, sir. I hope not to be a burden on them.”

“We do not turn starving strangers away in Eysar Haven,” said Stappin, and began to move toward the door. Joseph, thinking that the interview was at its end, felt a sudden great relief. But the governor was not done with him yet. Pausing at the threshold, Stappin said suddenly, “Who was your grandfather, boy?”

Joseph moistened his lips. “Why, Waerna was his name also, sir.”

“Is a Folkish name, Waerna. I mean your real grandfather, the one whose blood runs in your veins.”

“Sir?” said Joseph, baffled and a little frightened.

“Don’t play with me. There’s Master blood in you, is it not so? You think I can’t see? Look at you! That nose. Those eyes. Small wonder you stayed loyal to your House when the uprising came, eh? Blood calls out to blood. As much Master blood in you as there is Folk, I’d venture. Stendlings!” There was no doubting the contempt in his voice this time.

And then he was gone, and Joseph sank back against his pillow, numb, empty.

But he was safe. Despite their suspicions, they had taken him in. And in the days that followed, his strength began quickly to return. They fed him well; Joseph felt guilty about that, knowing that he would never stay here long enough to repay Saban and Simthot for what they were providing for him, but perhaps he could do something about that when, if, he reached his homeland again. Meanwhile his only consideration must be to make himself ready for a continuation of his journey. As Joseph grew accustomed to regular meals again, he ate more and more voraciously each day. Sometimes he ate too much, and went off by himself to hide the nausea and glut that his greed had caused in him. But his weight was returning. He no longer looked like a walking skeleton. Thayle trimmed his hair, which was shaggy and matted and hung down to his shoulders, now, cutting it back to the much shorter length favored by the people of Eysar Haven. Then Velk brought him a mirror and a scissors, so that Joseph could trim his beard, which had become a bedraggled disorderly black cloud completely enveloping his face and throat. He had not seen his own reflection in months, and he was horrified by what the mirror showed him, those knifeblade cheekbones, those crazily burning eyes. He scarcely recognized himself. He looked five years older than he remembered, and much transformed.

No one said anything to him, yet, about working. Once he was strong enough to go out on his own, he spent his days exploring the town, usually by himself, sometimes accompanied by Thayle. He found it very pleasant to be with her. Her strapping Folkish physique, the breadth of her shoulders and her wide staunch hips, no longer troubled him: he saw that he was adjusting his ideals of feminine beauty to fit the circumstances of his present life. He did indeed find her attractive, very much so. Now and again, as he lay waiting for sleep, he let his mind wander into thoughts of what it would be like to press his lips against Thayle’s, to cup her breasts in his hands, to slide himself between her parted thighs. The intensity of these fantasies was something utterly new to him.

Not that he attempted at all to indicate any of this to Thayle. This journey had changed him in many ways, and the uncertainties he once had had about girls now struck him as a quaint vestige of his childhood; but still, it seemed very wrong to him to be taking advantage of the hospitality of his hosts by trying to seduce the daughter of the household. His times alone with Thayle were infrequent, anyway. Like her father and brother and sometimes her mother, she went off for hours each day to work in the family fields. It was high summer, now, and the crops were growing quickly. And gradually Joseph learned that Thayle was involved with one of the young men of the town, a certain Grovin, who was almost certainly her lover and possibly her betrothed. That was something else to consider.

Joseph saw him now and then in the town, a lean, sly-faced sort, perhaps eighteen or nineteen, quick-eyed, mean-looking. He was not at all surprised, though he found it a little embarrassing, to find himself taking a dislike to Grovin. But he had no direct encounters with him.

The town itself was a modest little place, no more than two or three thousand people in all, Joseph guessed, although spread out over a fairly extensive area. All the houses were in one place, all the public buildings in another, and the farmland was beyond—the entire town holdings divided into small family-held plots, nothing communally operated as among the Indigenes, though Joseph gathered that all the townsfolk worked together at harvest-time, moving in teams from plot to plot.

This must have been the way the Folk lived before we came here, Joseph thought. A simple life, a quiet life, raise your crops and look after your cattle and have your children and grow old and give way to the next generation. That was the way the Folk of the Great Houses lived as well, he supposed, but everything they did was done in the service of their Masters, and although a wise Master treated his Folk well, the fact remained that they spent their lives working for their Masters and only indirectly for themselves.

Stendlings. A whole planet of stendlings is what we have turned them into, sparing only these few cuyling towns here and there in the outback. Joseph still could not see that there was anything seriously wrong with that. But obviously Governor Stappin and the citizens of Eysar Haven might have something different to say on that subject.

There was a statue in the middle of the little group of public buildings that formed the center of the town: a man of middle years, a very Folkish-looking man, thick-thighed and heavy-chested with his hair coming down over his forehead in bangs, carved from gray granite atop a black stone pedestal. He had not been very deftly portrayed, but there seemed to be wisdom and benevolence and much warmth in his expression as he stood there eternally looking out over the heart of the town.

Joseph could find no inscription on the base of the statue to indicate the identity of the man whom it represented. He did not dare ask any of the people strolling nearby. But certainly this must be Eysar, Joseph thought, since this town is named for him. Everyone would know what Eysar looked like: it is not necessary to put a label on his statue. He wondered if he would ever find out who Eysar was.

These were warm, lazy days. Joseph felt almost strong enough to set out for home once more, but the concept of “home” had become such a vague, remote thing in his mind that he saw no urgency in resuming his trek. Who could tell what new hardships awaited him once he took his leave of Eysar Haven? He knew what it was like, now, to starve. Here he was fed well, he had a soft place to sleep, he felt a certain warmth toward Saban and her family. It struck him as quite a plausible choice to remain here a while longer, working with Thayle and Velk and Simthot in the family fields, helping with the harvest, living as though he were really and truly the Folkish boy Waerna of Ludbrek House, now adopted into citizenship at the cuyling town of Eysar Haven.

The Master within him knew that this was foolishness, that it was his duty to get out of here as soon as he was capable of it and take himself onward toward Helikis, toward Keilloran House, toward the father and brothers and sisters who probably had never ceased mourning the loss of him and whose lives would be brightened beyond all measure by his return. It was only the weariness in him speaking, the damage that his time of eating roots and ants had caused, that made him think of lingering here. It was a sign that he was not yet healed.

But he let the days slide easily by and did not force himself to wrestle with the problem of becoming Joseph Master Keilloran again. And then, one warm humid summer evening at dusk, when he was walking through the fields with Thayle, amidst the ripening heads of grain, the whole thing was abruptly thrust upon him once more, out of nowhere, striking like a sudden lightning-bolt, an earthquake, a cataclysmic volcanic eruption.

He had just said, “Look how full these heads are, Thayle, how dark. It will be harvest-time in another month or so, won’t it? I’ll be able to help you with it by then.”

To which she replied sweetly, “Will you be staying here that long, then, Waerna? Are you not beginning to think of returning to your own people?”

He gave her a puzzled look. “My people? I have no people anymore. The Folk of Ludbrek House have scattered in every direction, those that are still alive. I don’t know where anyone is.”

“I’m not talking about the Folk of Ludbrek House. I mean your real people.”

The quiet statement rocked him. He felt like a small boat suddenly adrift in a stormy sea.

“What?” said Joseph, as casually as he could. He could not make himself look at her. “I’m not sure that I understand what—”

“I know what you are,” Thayle said.

“What I am?”

“What you are, yes.” She caught him by the sleeve and pulled him around to face her. She was smiling. Her eyes were shining strangely. “You’re a Master, aren’t you, Waerna?”

The word struck him with explosive force. He felt his heart starting to race and his breath came short. But Joseph struggled to permit nothing more than a look of mild bemusement to appear on his face. “This is crazy, Thayle. How could you possibly think that I’m—”

She was still smiling. She had no doubt at all of the truth of what she was telling him. “You have a Master look about you. I’ve seen some Masters now and then. I know what they look like. You’re tall and thin: do you see anybody tall and thin in Eysar Haven? And darker than we are. You have the darkest hair I’ve ever seen. And the shape of your nose—your lips—”

Her tone of voice was a gentle one, almost teasing. As though this were some sort of game. Perhaps for her it was. But not for him.

“So I have some Master blood in me.” Joseph kept his voice level, which was not an easy thing to manage. “Stappin said something about it to me, weeks ago. He noticed it right away. Well, it’s probably true. Such things have been known to happen.”

“ SomeMaster blood, Waerna? Some? ”

“Some, yes.”

“You know how to read. I know that you do. There are books in that pack you were carrying when you came here, and one night when I was outside the house very late I looked in your window and you were awake and reading one. It’s a Master book. What else could it be? And you were reading it. You look like a Master, and you read like a Master, and you have a little case that’s full of Master tools. I’ve looked at them while I was cleaning your room. I’ve never seen anything like them. And your books. I held the book-thing right in my hand and pressed the button, and Master words came out on the screen.”

“I dwelled among Masters at Ludbrek House. They taught me to read so I could serve them better.”

She laughed. “Taught a stable-boy to read, so he could be a better stable-boy?”

“Yes. And the utility case that you saw—I stole that when I fled from Ludbrek House. The books, too. I swear to you, Thayle, by whatever god you want me to swear by—”

“No.” She put her hand over his mouth. “Don’t lie, and don’t blaspheme. That’ll make everything worse. I know what you are. It has to be true. You hadn’t ever heard of Eysar, and you don’t know the names of our holidays, and there are a thousand other things about you that just aren’t right. I don’t know if anyone else here has seen it, but I certainly have.”

He was stymied. He could bluff all he liked, but nothing he could ever say would convince her. She thought that she knew what he was, and she was sure that she was right, and she was right, and Joseph would have to be the best actor in the world to make her believe now that he was of the Folk. Even that might not be good enough. She knew what he was. His life was in her hands.

He wondered what to do. Run back to the house, collect his things, get himself away from this place while he still could? He did not feel ready for that, not now, not so suddenly. Night was coming on. He had no idea which way to go. He would have to live off the land again, at a time when he was still not entirely recovered from his last attempt at that.

Thayle said, as though reading his mind, “You don’t need to be afraid of me, Waerna. I’m not going to tell anyone about you.”

“How can I be sure of that?”

“It would be bad for you, if I did. Stappin would never forgive you for lying to him. And he couldn’t let a runaway Master live among us, anyway. You’d have to leave here. I don’t want that. I like you, Waerna.”

“You do? Even though I’m a Master?”

“Yes. Yes. What does your being a Master have to do with it?” That strange glow was in her eyes again. “I won’t say a word to anyone. Look, I’ll swear it.” She made a sign in the air. She uttered a few words that Joseph could not understand. “Well?” she said. “Now do you trust me?”

“I wish I could, Thayle.”

“You can say a thing like that, after what you just heard me swear? I’d be furious with you, if you were Folk. But what you just said would tell me you’re a Master if nothing else I knew about you did. You don’t even know the Oath of the Crossing! It’s a wonder no one else here has caught on to you before this.” Joseph realized that somewhere in the last moments Thayle had taken both his hands in hers. She stood up on tiptoe, so that her face was very close to his. Softly she said, “Don’t be afraid of me, Waerna. I won’t ever bring you harm. Maybe the Oath of the Crossing doesn’t mean anything to you, but I’ll prove it to you another way, tonight. You wait and see.”

Joseph stared at her, not knowing what to say.

Then she tugged at him. “Let’s go back, all right? It’s getting near time for dinner.”

His mind was swirling. He wanted very much to believe that she would not betray him, but he could not be sure of that. And it was deeply troubling to realize that his secret was in her hands.

The evening meal was a tense business for him. Joseph ate without saying a word, looking down into his plate most of the time, avoiding the glances of these people with whom he had lived for weeks, people who had taken him in, cared for him, bathed him when he was too weak, fed him, clothed him, treated him as one of their own. He was convinced now that they all knew the truth about him, had known it a long while, not just Thayle but her brother also, and Simthot, and Saban. He must have given himself away a hundred times a day—whenever he failed to recognize some reference that any of the Folk from anywhere on Homeworld would have understood, whenever he said something in what he hoped was idiomatic Folkish that was actually phrased in a way that nobody who was truly of the Folk would ever phrase it.

So they knew. They had to know. And probably they were in constant anguish over it, debating whether to tell Stappin that they were sheltering a member of the enemy race here. Even if they wanted to protect him, they might fear that they were endangering their own safety by holding back on going to the governor and reporting what they knew. Suppose Stappin had already worked out his real identity also, and was simply waiting for them to come to him and report that the boy they were harboring was actually a fugitive Master? The longer they waited, the worse it would be for them, then. But possibly they were just biding their time until some appropriate moment, some special day of the Folkish year that he knew nothing about, when you stepped forward and denounced the liars and impostors in your midst—

In the evenings Saban and Simthot, and sometimes Velk as well, would settle in the front parlor to play a game called weriyel, which involved making patterns with little interlocking pieces of carved bone on a painted board. Joseph had explained, early on, that this game had not been known to him in his days at Ludbrek House, and they had seemed to take that at face value; Velk had taught him the rules, and some evenings he played with them, although he had not yet developed much skill at it. Tonight he declined to join them. He did not want to remind them of how badly he played. He was sure that his lack of knowledge of the rules of weriyel was one more bit of evidence that he was no true man of the Folk.

Thayle never took part in the weriyel games. Most evenings she went out—to be with her lover Grovin, Joseph assumed. He did not really know, and he scarcely felt free to ask her. Lately he had taken to imagining the two of them going off to some secluded grove together and falling down to the ground in a frenzied embrace. It was not a thought that he welcomed in any way, but the harder he tried to rid his mind of it, the more insistently it forced itself upon him.

Though darkness was slow to come on these summer nights and it was much too early to think about going to sleep, Joseph, uncomfortable now in the company of his hosts, retired early to his room and sprawled glumly atop his bed, staring upward, hands locked behind his head. Another night he might have spent the time reading, but now he was fearful of that, not wanting Saban or Velk to come in without warning, as they sometimes did, and find him with the little reader in his hands. It was bad enough that Thayle, spying on him late at night through the window—and why had she done that?—had seen him reading. But it would be the end of everything for him here if one of others actually walked in and caught him at it.

Joseph saw no solution for his predicament other than to leave Eysar Haven as soon as possible. Tomorrow, even, or perhaps the day after: pack his belongings, say his farewells, thank Saban and her family for their hospitality, head off down the road. There was no need for him to sneak away, as he had done when leaving the Indigenes. These people did not own him. He was merely a guest in their midst. And, though Joseph had agreed to repay them for his lodgings by helping them with the harvest, they would very likely be happy enough to see him get on his way without waiting around for harvest-time, suspecting what they surely did about his real identity. It was the only sensible thing to do: go, go quickly, before the anomaly of a Master dwelling in a Folkish town became too much for anyone to tolerate.

Finally it was dark enough to try to sleep. He got under the covers. But he was still all awhirl within, and he lay stiffly, hopelessly awake, shifting from one position to another and finding none to his liking. There was not going to be any sleep for him at all this night, Joseph decided.

But he must have fallen asleep somewhere along the way, because he heard the door of his room opening and sat up, groggy and confused as one is when one is abruptly awakened, with the fragments of an exploded dream still floating through his mind. Someone had come in. Joseph could see very little, what might have been a figure at his threshold, a mere outline, darkness against darkness. “Who’s there?” he asked.

“Shh! Quiet!”

“Thayle?”

“Shh!”

Footsteps. A rustling sound, as of garments being thrown aside. This was beyond all belief. I am still asleep, Joseph thought. I am dreaming this. He was aware of movements close by him. His coverlet being drawn back. She was joining him in bed. A warm body up against his flesh, too warm, too real, to be a phantasm of the night.

“Thayle—what—?”

“I told you I’d show you tonight that you could trust me. Now be quiet, will you? Please!” Her hands were moving boldly over his body. Joseph lay still, astonished, wonderstruck. So it was going to happen at last, he realized, the thing that he had read about in so many books and plays and stories and poems, the thing that he knew he would experience eventually, but which he had not thought would be coming to him so soon, here, now, tonight. Perhaps it had been inevitable that his first time would be with a girl of the Folk. He did not care about that. He did not care about anything, just now, except what was unfolding in this bed. Her touch drew shivers from him. He wished he could see her, but there were no moons tonight, not even much starlight, and he dared not break the flow of events to light a lamp, nor did he think she would want him to.

“You can touch me,” she said. “It’s allowed.”

Joseph was hesitant about that for a moment, but only for a moment. His hand hovered over her, descended, found her. A thigh, this was. A hip. That sturdy body, that strong wide-hipped Folkish body, here against him, naked, willing. The fragrance of her flesh, delighting him, dizzying him. He slid his hand upward, meeting no discouragement, until he found her breasts. Carefully he closed his fingers over one of them. It was a firm, heavy, resilient globe; it filled his entire hand. He could feel the little hard node of her nipple pressing against his palm. So that is what breasts feel like, Joseph thought. He had expected them to be softer, somehow, but perhaps the softness happened later, when a woman was twenty or twenty-five, and had had some babies. He wriggled around to a better position and glided across the valley of her chest to the other breast, and caressed them both for a while. She seemed to like it that he was touching her breasts. Her lips sought his, and found them, and he was astounded to find her tongue slipping between his lips. Is that what people did when they kissed? Tongues? He felt impossibly innocent. Surely she must realize, by this time, how totally innocent he was. But that was all right, Joseph thought, so long as she does not laugh, so long as she leads me along step by step, so long as she teaches me what to do. As she was doing.

On his own initiative he moved his hand lower, sliding it down her body, reaching her belly, now, the deep indentation of her navel, halting there, running the hand from side to side, from one hard upjutting hipbone to the other. Then, emboldened, he went onward, found the soft, dense patch of hair at the meetingplace of her thighs, touched it, stroked it. She seized two of his fingers and thrust them inward. He felt moisture. Warmth.

And then everything was happening very quickly. He was on her, searching, thrusting, suddenly inside her, enveloped in that moist softness, the tender velvety secret place between her legs, moving. It was an astounding sensation. No wonder, no wonder, that themes of desire and passion were so central to all those books, those plays, those poems. Joseph had always supposed it would be something extraordinary, the act itself, but he had never really imagined—how could he?—the actual intensity of the feeling, that sense of being inside another human being, of being so intimately linked, of having these exquisite ecstatic feelings spreading outward from his loins to the entirety of his body. They built and built with irresistible force, sweeping him away within moments: he wanted to hold back, to savor all this a little longer, but there was no way he could do that, and as the spasms rocked him like a series of detonations Joseph gasped and shuddered and pressed his face down beside Thayle’s cheek and clung to her strong sturdy body until it was over, and then he was lying stunned against her, limp, sweaty, drained, trembling, ashamed.

Ashamed?

Yes. In that first moment of return from his climax it astonished him how quickly he had traveled from unthinkable ecstasy to dark, exhausted, bewildered guilt. The whole descent had taken mere instants. Now that Joseph was able to think coherently again, his thoughts all were bleak ones. He had not expected that. There had been no chance to expect anything. But now, now, in the surprisingly harsh and chilly aftermath, looking back at that frenzy of eager grappling, he could not help but focus on the question of what sort of pleasure there could have been in it for her. Could there have been any, any at all? She had merely served as the instrument of his own delight. He had simply entered her, moved quickly, used her for his own gratification. Master and peasant girl, the old, old story, disgusting, shameful. He had never hated himself so much as in that moment.

He felt impelled to say something, and could not, and then did. “It all went so fast,” Joseph said, speaking into his pillow, his voice rough and frayed, sounding unfamiliar in his own ears. “I’m sorry, Thayle. I’m sorry. I didn’t want—”

“Shh. It was fine. Believe me, Waerna.”

“But I would rather have—I would have liked to—

“ Shh!Be still, and don’t worry. It was fine. Fine. Just lie here beside me and relax.” Soothingly she stroked Joseph’s back, his shoulder, his arm. “In a little while you’ll be ready to go again.”

And he was. This time it all went much less frenziedly for him. There was none of the crazy heedless swiftness of before. He felt almost like an expert. He had always been a quick learner. He knew now what to expect, had a better understanding of how to pace himself, how to hold himself back. Thayle moved skillfully beneath him, a steady pumping rhythm, delightful, amazing. Then the rhythms grew more irregular and she dug her fingertips hard into his shoulders, clung to him, rocked her hips, arched her back, threw back her head, and he knew that something was happening within her, something awesome, something convulsive, although he was not entirely sure what it was; and a weird throaty sound emerged from her, deep, throbbing, not even really a human sound, and Joseph knew that her big moment must have arrived. Somewhere within it he had his own, not as overwhelming as before, not nearly, but nonetheless an immensely powerful sensation.

There was no guilt or shame this time, none of the terrible bleakness of that earlier aftermath. He felt only a calm sense of accomplishment, of achievement, an awareness of pleasure given and received. It seemed to Joseph that he had crossed some border in this past hour, stepping over into a strange and wonderful new land from which there would be no returning.

They lay tangled together, spent and sticky, breathing hoarsely, saying nothing for a long while.

“It was my first time,” he said finally.

“I know.”

“Ah. Was it that easy to tell, then?”

“Everybody has a first time sometime. It’s not anything you need to explain. Or to apologize for.”

“I just want to thank you,” Joseph said. “It was very beautiful.”

“And for me also. I won’t ever forget it.” She giggled. “Grovin would kill me if he found out. He thinks he owns me, you know. But no one owns me. No one. I do as I please.” She drew a little playful line along Joseph’s jaw with the tip of one finger. “Now we each have a secret against each other, do you see? I could tell Stappin that you’re a Master, but I won’t. And you could tell Grovin that I’ve been to bed with you.”

“But I won’t.”

“No. Neither of us will say anything to anybody. We’ve put each other in each other’s hands. —But now tell me your real name. You can’t be a Waerna. Waerna isn’t a Master name.”

“Joseph,” he said.

“That’s a strange name. Joseph . Joseph . I’ve never heard a name like that before.”

“It’s an ancient name. It goes back to Old Earth. My father has an Earth name too: Martin.”

“Joseph. Martin.”

“I’m not from Ludbrek House, either. Not from Manza at all. I’m Joseph Master Keilloran of House Keilloran in Helikis.”

It was strange and somehow wonderful to speak the full name out loud, here in this little Folkish town, in this Folkish house, lying here naked in the arms of this naked Folkish girl. It was the final nakedness, this last stripping away of all concealment. Thayle had never heard of House Keilloran, of course, had barely heard of Helikis itself—a far-off land, that was all she knew, somewhere down in the southern part of the world—but she said the name three or four times, Joseph Master Keilloran of House Keilloran in Helikis, Joseph Master Keilloran of House Keilloran in Helikis, as though the words had some magical potency for her. She had some difficulty pronouncing Joseph’s surname correctly, but he saw no point in correcting her. Joseph felt very drowsy, very happy. Idly he stroked her body in a tender but nonsexual way, his hand traveling lightly along her flanks, her belly, her cheeks, a purely esthetic enjoyment, simply enjoying the smoothness of her, the firmness of her skin and the taut flesh and muscle beneath it, the way he might stroke a finely carved statuette, or a thoroughbred racing-bandar, or a perfectly thrown porcelain bowl. He did not think there was any likelihood that he could feel desire again just yet, not so soon after those two cataclysmic couplings. But then his hands were going to her breasts, and then to her thighs, and to his surprise and delight he felt himself awakening to the pull of her body one more time, and she made a little chuckling sound of approval and drew him down into her once more.

Afterward she kissed him gently and wished him pleasant dreams, and gathered up her scattered clothing and went out. When she was gone Joseph lay awake for a while, reliving all that had taken place, playing it back in his mind with the utmost vividness, watching it all in wonder, amazement, even disbelief. He tumbled then into sleep as into a crevasse on some lofty snowy mountain slope and was lost in it, dreamless, insensate, until morning.

There was no possibility after the experiences of that night of his leaving Eysar Haven of his own volition, regardless of the risks involved in his staying. Thayle had tied him to it with unbreakable silken bands. His only thought now was of when she would enter his bed again.

But that did not happen immediately. Often in the days that followed Joseph would glance toward her and see that she was covertly looking at him, or that she was smiling warmly in his direction, or even winking and blowing him a kiss; but though he lay awake for a long while each night hoping for the sound of the opening door, the footsteps approaching his bed, the rustle of clothing being shed, four nights went by before she finally did come back. It was an eternity. “I thought you were never going to be with me again,” he said, as his hands moved toward her breasts. She said something about needing to take care that her parents did not discover what was going on under their own roof. No doubt that was so. But also it had occurred to Joseph that Thayle probably was in the habit of spending several evenings a week with Grovin, and would not want to come to him while her body was still sweaty and slippery from another man’s passions. He tried not to think about that; but it was a time of agony to him, those nights that he waited in vain for her, imagining that at this very moment she might be with Grovin, doing with him the same things that he so desperately wanted her to be doing once more with him.

Twice during those days his path and Grovin’s crossed in town, and both times Grovin gave him hard, sour looks. Joseph asked Thayle about that, wondering whether Grovin suspected something, perhaps the truth about Joseph’s identity or else the possibility that he and Thayle were taking advantage of his presence in her family’s house to do the very thing that they were in fact doing. But she assured him that neither could be true. “If he so much as dreamed you were a Master, he’d have taken it up with Stappin already. And as for suspecting you and me—no, no, he’s so confident of himself that it would never occur to him. If he thought anything was going on between us he’d have let me know about it by now.”

“Then why does he look at me that way?”

“He looks at everybody that way. It’s just the way he is.”

Maybe so. Still, Joseph did not much like it.

The summer days floated along in a golden haze of mounting heat. The harvest season approached. Joseph lived for the nights of Thayle’s visits. Helikis might have been a continent on another planet for all that it entered his mind.

They were friends as well as lovers, by this time. In the intervals between their bouts of lovemaking they talked, lying side by side looking toward the ceiling instead of at each other, sometimes for hours. She revealed a lively, questing intelligence: that came as a surprise to Joseph. It fascinated Thayle that he should be a Master. In this district of cuyling Folk, where the nearest Great Houses were far off beyond the mountains, Masters were unfamiliar, exotic things. She understood that most of the rest of the world was divided up into huge feudal estates on which her people had for many hundreds of years lived, essentially, as property, until the recent outbreak of violent revolution. She had heard about that, anyway. But she seemed to have no inward grasp of what it was like. “You own the Folk who live on your land?” she asked. “How is that, that one person can own others?”

“We don’t exactly own them. We provide for them; we make sure everyone is housed, that nobody goes hungry, that there’s work for everybody, that good medical care is available. And in return for that they work the lands, and look after the livestock, and do what needs to be done in the factories.”

“But everyone is housed here in Eysar Haven, and everyone has work to do, and nobody goes hungry, and all of that. Why would we need Masters here?”

“You don’t, I suppose. But the Folk of other places aren’t as self-sufficient as the people of the cuyling towns are.”

“You mean, they came to your ancestors and said, ‘Please rule us, please be our Masters?’ They wanted your people to take charge of their lives for them?”

“Well, in a manner of speaking—”

“No. Actually they were conquered, weren’t they? There was a thing called the Conquest, when the Masters came out of the sky and seized the land and forced everyone to submit to them. Except for a few like us, off in places of the world that nobody seemed to want to bother conquering. Isn’t that so, Joseph?”

He could not deny that. He would not even try. It would not be known as the Conquest, he thought, if it had not been a conquest. And yet—yet—it had always been his understanding that the Masters had imposed the system of Great Houses upon the Folk for the good of the Folk themselves, not just for their own, and that the Folk had learned to see the wisdom of that system. It had been his understanding, too, that the Folk were an inherently weak breed, nothing more than creatures of a docile domesticated sort that had been waiting for leadership to be provided for them.

But it was impossible for Joseph to say any of that to her. How could he let this girl—this woman, really—for whom he now felt such desire, such need, such love, even, and from whom he had received such delights and hoped to receive more, think that he looked upon her not as a human being but as a kind of domesticated beast? Not only would telling her that be a hideous impossible insult, but he knew it was not even true. Everything about her demonstrated that. Everything he had seen about Eysar Haven demonstrated that. These people were quite capable of functioning on their own. And perhaps that had been true of all the other Folk, too, once upon a time, back before the Conquest.

It was clear to him now that the Conquest had been a conquest indeed, in fact as well as name. The Folk had been doing well enough before the first Masters came to Homeworld. They lacked the force and drive of Masters, perhaps, but was that a sin? Had they deserved to lose control of their own lives, their own world, for such failings? The Masters had subjugated the Folk. There was no other applicable word. Even if the bloody rebellion that had driven Joseph himself into these wanderings across the face of the continent of Manza had not taught him by now how resentful of Master rule the Folk were, or some of them, anyway, this stay in Eysar Haven and these late-night conversations with Thayle would have shown him that. It all seemed obvious enough to him now; but it was devastating to him to be forced to see how much he had simply taken for granted, he with his fine Master mind, his keen, searching intellect.

She challenged him in other areas, too.

“Your father, the Master of House Keilloran—how did he get to be the Master of the House?” She still could not pronounce the name correctly, but Joseph let that go. “Did everybody who lives there choose him for that?”

“His father was Master of the House before him,” Joseph told her. “And his father before that, going back to the beginning. The eldest son inherits the title.”

“That’s all?” Thayle said. “He is allowed to govern thousands and thousands of people, Masters and Folk alike, simply because he’s his father’s son? How strange. It seems very foolish to me. Suppose there’s someone else better suited to govern, somebody who’s smarter and wiser and more capable in every way. Everyone can see that, but he won’t be allowed, will he? Because he’s not the eldest son of the eldest son. That’s a stupid system, I think.” Joseph said nothing, and Thayle was silent a moment, too. Then she said, “What happens if there’s more than one son? That wouldn’t be very unusual, would it?”

“The eldest son always inherits.”

“Even if the second or even third son is plainly better qualified. Or the second or third daughter , for that matter. But I suppose daughters don’t figure into this.”

“Only the eldest son,” Joseph said. “He’s specially trained for the job from childhood on. Since it’s known that he’s going to inherit, they see to it that he’s been properly taught to do what must be done.”

“But no matter how well they teach him, he isn’t necessarily the smartest member of his family, is he? Even if it is agreed that you have to limit the title to a single family just because that family happens to have grabbed power first, you could have generation after generation where the new Master isn’t even the best qualified person among his own people. Do you think that’s so good, Joseph?”

This is a girl of the Folk who is asking me these questions, he said to himself. This is a docile, ignorant creature, a peasant, a person incapable of serious thought.

There was another long silence.

Thayle said then, “Are you the eldest son, Joseph?”

“Yes. Yes, I am.”

“You will inherit the title, then, and be Master of House Keilloran. By right of birth alone, nothing else.”

“If I live to get home, yes. Otherwise my brother Rickard will be. He won’t like that, if things happen that way. He never expected to rule and he’s not well prepared for doing it.”

“But he’ll become the Master anyway, because he’ll be the eldest available son.”

“Yes. Yes.”

“By right of birth alone. Not necessarily because he’ll be a good Master.”

He wished she would stop pounding at him. “Rickard will be a good Master if the title comes to him,” Joseph said stubbornly. “I’m sure that he will. I know that he will.” But he could not hide the lack of conviction in his voice. He was amazed at how, within the space of fifteen minutes, Thayle had undermined every assumption he had ever held about the relationship of Master to Folk, about the method by which the Great Houses chose their leaders, about the merit of his own automatic succession to the powers of head of the House. He felt as though this bed on which the two of them were lying had turned somehow into a flimsy raft, on which he was being borne down some turbulent river toward a steep cataract that lay only a short distance ahead.

Joseph let the silence stretch and stretch until it was nearing the breaking-point, but still he could not bring himself to speak. Whatever he might say would be wrong.

“Are you angry with me?” Thayle asked him finally.

“No. Of course I’m not.”

“I’ve offended you. You thought I was criticizing you.”

“You have a different way of looking at things, that’s all. I was just thinking about everything you said.”

“Don’t think too much. Not now.” She reached across to him. Gratefully he surrendered to her embrace. They began to move in the way that was already beginning to become familiar to them. Joseph was glad to be able to lose himself in the unthinking pleasures that her supple body offered.

The next morning after breakfast, the hour when nearly everyone had gone off to the day’s work in the fields and Joseph was alone in the house, he was startled to hear her voice, calling to him from outside, a low, sharp whisper: “ Joseph! Joseph!”

That surprised him, that she should be calling him by his real name. But at this time of the day there was no one around but old people and small children to hear her do it.

And the fact of Thayle’s presence here at this time of day made his heart leap. She must have sneaked back from the fields so that they could be together. It was exciting to think that she would want him that much. And there was another thing: they had never made love by daylight. That would be something new, different, wonderful, a revelation.

He rushed out onto the porch to greet her and lead her to his bedroom.

But then he saw her. How she looked. “Thayle?” he said, in a small, bewildered voice. “What happened, Thayle? Was there an accident?”

“Oh, Joseph—oh—oh, Joseph—”

She looked horrifying. Her clothing was torn and dirty. One sleeve dangled by threads. Thayle herself looked bruised and hurt. Her lower lip had a bloody cut on it and it was beginning to turn puffy. Another narrow trail of blood ran down from one of her nostrils. Her left eye was swelling shut. She held her hand pressed to her cheek: that seemed to be swelling up also. One of her sandals was missing. Her expression was a strange one: blank, frozen, dazed.

Joseph gathered her in without asking questions, held her close against himself, gently stroked her back and shoulders. She began to sob quietly. For a few moments she accepted the comfort he was offering her, and then she pulled back from him, looking up into his eyes, searching for words. “You have to leave,” she said. “Right now. There’s no time to waste.”

“But what—what—?”

“Grovin. He knows. He was hiding outside your window last night. He heard us . . . everything.”

“And he beat you?” Joseph asked, incredulous. “He did this?” It had never occurred to him that a man would strike a woman, any woman, let alone his own lover. But then he reminded himself that these people were Folk, and that not very long ago the Folk had risen up and slaughtered their Masters as they sat in their manor-houses, and plenty of their own kind as well.

“He did it, yes.” She made it sound almost unimportant. “Come on, Joseph! Come on . Get your things. I’ve taken a truck. We need to get you away from here, fast. I told you he’d kill me if he found out I was going to bed with you, and he will, he will, if you stay here any longer. And he’ll kill you too.”

It was still hard for Joseph to get his mind around all that Thayle was telling him. He felt like a sleepwalker who has been unceremoniously awakened. “You say he overheard us?” he asked. “The lovemaking, you mean, or the things we were discussing, too? Do you think he knows I’m a Master?”

“He knows, yes. Not because he overheard our conversation. I told him. He suspected that you were, you know. He’s suspected all along. So he asked me what I knew about you, and then he hit me until I told him the truth. And hit me again afterward. —Oh, please, Joseph, don’t just stand there in that idiotic way! You have to get moving. Now. This very minute. Before he brings Stappin down on you.”

“Yes. Yes.” The stasis that had enfolded him these past few minutes began to lift. Joseph rushed into his room, grabbed up his few possessions, bundled them together. When he emerged he saw that Thayle had had the presence of mind to assemble a little packet of food for him. He was going to be alone again soon, he realized, trekking once more through unknown regions of this unfriendly continent, living off the land.

The thought of parting from her was unbearable.

What was running through his mind now were thoughts not of the dangers he would be facing out there, or of the trouble Grovin could cause for him before he managed to leave, but only of Thayle’s lips, Thayle’s breasts, Thayle’s open thighs, Thayle’s heaving hips. All of which had been his this brief while, and which now he must leave behind forever.

When they emerged from the house they found Grovin waiting outside, standing squarely in their path. His face was cold and mean, a tight, pinched-looking, furious face. He glared at them, looking from Thayle to Joseph, from Joseph to Thayle, and said, “Going somewhere?”

“Stop it, Grovin. Let us pass. I’m taking him to the highway.”

He ignored her. To Joseph he said, icily, fiercely, “You thought you had a sweet little deal, didn’t you? They fed you, they gave you a soft place to sleep, and they gave you something soft to sleep with, too. Wasn’t that nice? But what are you doing here, anyway, you lazy parasite? Why aren’t you dead like the rest of your kind?”

Joseph stared. This was his rival, the man who had hurt Thayle. What was he supposed to do, hurt this man in return? Something within him cried out that he should do it, that he should beat Grovin to his knees for having dared to take his hand to her. But nothing in his education had prepared him for doing anything like that. This was not like punishing an unruly field-hand, which any Master would do without thinking twice about it; this was something else, a private quarrel over a woman, between two people who also happened to be of two different races.

Nothing in his education had prepared him, either, for the spectacle of an angry Folker hurling abuse at him this way. That was not a thing that ought to be happening. It was a phenomenon on the order of water running uphill, of the sun rising in the west, of snow falling in the middle of summer. Joseph did not know what to say or do. It was Thayle, instead, who took it upon herself to step forward and push Grovin out of the way; but Grovin merely grinned and seized her by one wrist and flung her easily from him, sending her spiraling down into a heap on the ground.

That could not be allowed. Joseph dropped the things he was carrying and went toward him, not sure of what he was going to do but certain that he had to do something.

He had fought before, roughhousing with other Master boys his age, or even with Anceph or Rollin, but it had been clearly understood then that no one would be hurt. This was different. Joseph clenched his hand into a fist and swung at Grovin, who slapped the fist aside as though it were a gnat and punched him in the pit of the stomach. Joseph staggered back, amazed. Grovin came after him, growling, actually growling, and hit him again, once on the point of his left shoulder, once on the side of his chest, once on the fleshy part of his right arm.

Being hit like this was as surprising as first sex had been, but not at all in the same way. The flying fists, the sudden sharp bursts of pain, the absolute wrongness of it all—Joseph was barely able to comprehend what was taking place. He understood that it was necessary to fight back. He could do it. Grovin was slightly built, for a Folker, and shorter than Joseph besides. Joseph had the advantage of a longer reach. And he was angry, now, thinking of what Grovin had dared to do to Thayle.

He struck out, once, twice, swinging hard, missing the first time but landing a solid blow on Grovin’s cheekbone with the second blow. Grovin grunted and stepped backward as though he had been hurt, and Joseph, heartened, came striding in to hit him again. It was an error. He managed to hit Grovin once more, a badly placed punch that went sliding off, and then the other, crouching before him like a coiled spring, came back at him suddenly with a baffling flurry of punches, striking here, here, there, spinning Joseph around, kicking him as he was turned about, then hitting him again as Joseph swung back to face him. Joseph staggered. He moved his arms wildly, hoping somehow to connect, but Grovin was everywhere about him, hitting, hitting, hitting. Joseph was helpless. I am being beaten by a Folker, Joseph thought in wonder. He is faster than I am, stronger than I am, in every way a better fighter. He will smash me into the ground. He will destroy me.

He continued to fight back as well as he could, but his best was not nearly good enough. Grovin danced around him, hissing derisively, laughing, punching at will, and Joseph made only the foggiest of responses. He was faltering now, lurching and teetering, struggling to keep from falling. Grovin took him by the shoulders and spun him around. And then, as Joseph turned groggily back to face him and began gamely winding up for one last desperate swing, Grovin was no longer there. Joseph did not see him at all. He stood blinking, bewildered.

Thayle was at Joseph’s side. “Hurry, Joseph! Hurry, now!”

Her eyes were bright and wild, and her face was flushed. In her hand she was gripping a thick, stubby piece of wood, a club, really. She looked at it, grinning triumphantly, and tossed it away. Joseph caught sight of Grovin a short distance off to the left, kneeling in a huddled moaning heap, shoulders hunched, head down, rocking his head from side to side. He was holding both hands clapped to his forehead. Blood was streaming out freely between his fingers.

Joseph could not believe that Thayle had done that to him. He could not have imagined a woman clubbing a man like that, not under any circumstances, any at all.

But these people are Folk, Joseph reminded himself. They are very different from us.

Then he was scooping up his discarded possessions and running, battered and dizzy and aching as he was, alongside Thayle toward the truck that was parked at the edge of the clearing, a truck much like the one in which his two rescuers had brought him to Eysar Haven many weeks before. He jumped in beside her. She grasped the steering-stick and brought the truck to a roaring start.

Neither of them spoke until they were well outside the town. Joseph saw that it was not easy for Thayle to control the vehicle, that it took all her concentration to keep it from wandering off the road. Plainly she was not an experienced driver. But she was managing it, somehow.

It did not seem to him that the fight had caused him any serious injury. Grovin had hurt him, yes. There would be bruises. There would be painful places for some days to come. But his disorientation and bewilderment in the final stages of the battle, that weird helplessness, he saw now, had been the result more of simply finding himself personally involved in violence, finding himself in actual hand-to-hand combat, than of any damage Grovin had been able to inflict. Of course, it might all have become much worse very soon. If Grovin had succeeded in knocking him down, if Grovin had begun to kick him and stomp on him, if Grovin had jumped on him and started to throttle him—

Thayle’s intervention had saved his life, Joseph realized. Grovin might well have killed him. That might even have been what he was trying to do.

The truck rolled onward. Joseph was the first to break the long silence, with a question that had been nibbling at his soul since they had boarded the truck. “Tell me, Thayle, are we going to stay together?”

“What do you mean, Joseph?” She sounded very far away.

“Just what I said. You and me, together, on the whole drive south. To the Isthmus. To Helikis, you and me, the whole way.” He stared urgently at her. “Stay with me, Thayle. Please.”

“How can I do that?” That same distant tone, drawing all the life out of him. Her hand went idly to the cut and bruised places on her face, touching them lightly, investigating them. “I can take you as far as the crossroads.” They had already left the town behind, Joseph saw. They were back in forested territory again, on a two-lane road, not well paved. “Then I have to go back to Eysar Haven.”

“No, Thayle. Don’t.”

“I have to. Eysar Haven is where I live. Those are my people. That is my place.”

“You’ll go back to him ?”

“He won’t touch me again. I’ll see to that.”

“I want you to come with me,” Joseph said, more insistently. “Please.”

She laughed. “Yes, of course. To your great estate in the south. To your grand home. To your father the Master of the House, and your Master brothers and sisters, and all the Folk who belong to you. How can I do that, Joseph?” She was speaking very quietly. “Ask yourself: How can I possibly do that?”

It was an unanswerable question. Joseph had known from the start that what he was asking of her was madness. Come strolling into Keilloran House after this long absence, blithely bringing with him a Folkish girl, his companion, his bedmate, his—beloved? There was no way. She could see that even more clearly than he. But he had had to ask. It was a crazy thing, an impossible thing, but he had had to ask. He hated having to leave her.

A second road had appeared, as roughly made as the one they were on, running at right angles to it. Thayle brought the truck erratically to a halt. “That’s the road that runs toward the south,” she told him. “Somewhere down that way is the place where your people live. I hope you have a safe journey home.” There was something terribly calm and controlled about her voice that plunged him into an abyss of sadness.

Joseph opened the door and stepped down from the truck. He hoped that she would get out too, that they could have one last embrace here by the side of the road, a hug, at least, so that he could know once more the feeling of her strong body in his arms, her breasts pressing up against him, the warmth of her on his skin. But she did not get out. Perhaps that was the very thing that she wanted to avoid: to be drawn back into the whole unworkable thing, to have him reawaken in her something that must of necessity be allowed to sleep. She leaned across, instead, and took his hand and squeezed it, and bent toward him so that they could kiss, a brief, awkward kiss that was made all the more difficult for them by the cut on her lip, and that was all there was going to be.

“I won’t ever forget you,” Joseph said.

“Nor I,” she told him. And then she was gone and he was alone again.

He stood looking at the truck as it swung around and disappeared in the distance, praying that she would change her mind, that she would halt and come back and invite him to clamber up alongside her and drive off toward Helikis with him. But of course that did not happen.

Soon the vehicle was lost to view. He was alone in the stillness here, the frightening quiet of this empty place.